Yesterday I was reading the new issue of MOJO and found Robert Cray joining a rather silly debate in the magazine over whether you can play blues on a Stratocaster guitar (or on a Telecaster, for that matter). Cray’s entering into the dialogue served the purpose of both legitimizing the topic and rendering the final word upon it. For what blues scholar could follow Robert Cray?
Today came the announcement that Robert Cray will headline one of the three free 2011 Music on the Green concerts on New Haven Green. Nice to have a legend like that breeze into town just as I’ve gained fresh respect for him. With his accustomed band of Richard Cousins on bass, Jim Pugh on keyboards and drummer Anthony Braunage, Cray will play July 23 at 7 p.m. The show actually begins at 6 p.m. with opening act Furious George.
The Robert Cray Band is the final concert in the series.The middle one is Johnny Gill July 16 with opening act to be announced.
Starting off the whole Music on the Green shebang July 9 is the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
I’m delighted to hear that the NHSO will be playing Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf, which my own daughters have only recently rediscovered through the versions by David Bowie (narrating over Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra) and Peter Schickele (who resets the oboe-is-a-duck classic in the old west and renames it Sneaky Pete and the Wolf).
The NHSO’s Green rendition will involve the Delaware-based vaudevillean duo Really Inventive Stuff, aka Michael Boudewyns and Sara Valentine. Both are performers, but for their Peter and the Wolf (which they’ve done as far afield as Philadelphia—hey, same orchestra as Bowie used!—and Richmond) Valentine is the director and Boudewyns is the sole performer of the half-hour piece. Peter and the Wolf is only one of the pieces they do with orchestras; they also have Mozart’s Toy Symphony, Britten’s Young Person’s Guide and adaptations of Babar and Dr. Seuss books in their repertoire.
The concert announcement is welcome news because the Green’s permanent stage area was dismantled and scrapped a month ago, and there were deep concerns as to whether some of the traditional Green series would even happen. Music on the Green, for instance, is directly related to the old New Haven Jazz Festival, though it dropped that title years ago when the offerings became stylistically broader. (The New Haven Jazz Festival title has since been picked up by a local festival held on the Green later in the summer.) the Shubert theater’s overseer CAPA and sponsored by Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas was able to enlist a dedicated sponsor to provide a stage for all its events (June 12-25), but others who want to stage shows on the Green will have to add truck stages (or perhaps lumber) to their budgets. The New Haven Symphony Orchestra, which has done multiple Green concerts in the past, seemed to be particularly stuck, since all those players won’t fit in a temporary truck (unless they’re classical musicians doubling as circus clowns).
More info at www.INFONewHaven.com, Market New Haven’s own city-events-calendar site.