The Orion Experience, NYC Girl EP

An instant antidote for shoegaze-moody overload, there are hints of everything from ELO to Partridge Family to New Edition to Jellyfish in this dance-oriented teeny-bopping semi-glam quintet. There’s an assured self-awareness of how goofy The Orion Experience lets itself get on songs like “Vampire,” a giddy game of how far they can go before they’ve exhausted every jaunty rhyme about a woman who resembles the titular supernatural temptress (“strolling through the city/her heart has got no pity for ya/ strutting through the ghetto in sexy black stilettos”). Elsewhere, they do the same thing with guitar sounds and studio techniques, mirroring great 45 RPM sounds from the ‘70s with fiendish devotion.

I have been remiss in not writing more, sooner, about the 2001 International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which began yesterday. My main sticking point is that I won’t be in town to experience most of it. Instead I’m in Los Angeles, covering several other festivals as a “fellow” in the NEA/Annenberg arts journalism program.
I’ve attended part of every Arts & Ideas festival since the annual summer tourism-boosting events began in the mid 1990s. While for most years of it I can boast having seen and reviewed every major (and a whole lot of “minor”) events, it’s not unprecedented for me to have missed whole swats of Arts & Ideas. Twice in particular, owing to the wondrous June births of my daughters Mabel and Sally.
I’m writing this on an airplane en route L.A. on June 12, but I was able to squeeze in one A&I event before blowing town. It is the one which will likely define the fest for a lot of people anyhow: Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project’s free concert on new haven green.
He wouldn’t remember me, but Yo Yo Ma and I both lived in Winchester, Mass., in the 1970s. I babysat regularly for the Cass family who lived next door to him. It was common to see him tossing a cell on hired car trunk and driving of to the airport. (I could relate, since my father was, among other things, a touring puppeteer who likewise was always tossing odd baggage around).
We also attended the same Winchester church, Parish of the Epiphany. My older sister Catherine and I sang in the choir. On Christmas eves Yo Yo Ma would be up in the choir loft as well, playing preludes and postludes to an entertained and truly blessed congregation.
Those memories came flooding back to me Saturday when I took a break from packing for L.A. The girls and I wandered downtown for book-browsing, ice cream licking and Green grazing. The evening rains had subsided, but only just. Thousands of people packed New Haven Green, many sitting on the grass and barely noticing it was soggy. When they stood, it wasn’t because it was wet but because they were giving a rapturous ovation.
The sounds were intoxicating. We were latecomers to the concert, and the music wafted us from the upper Green towards the stage. The only previous Green convert I can compare that experience to is when Chaka Khan appeared there at one of the Music on the Green series, backed by an orchestral big band. The Silk Road Ensemble’s aural allure was similar, the sense of mixed cultural traditions equally apparent, the wildly diverse yet devoutly respectful audience a credit to the arts-loving masses which make up New Haven.
But this Silk Road journey was unique. Where classical players, and big bands, often maintain a certain austerity and formality even when playing for “the people,” Yo Yo Ma and his bandmates were doing all they could to break down those barriers. They behaved more like a jam band than a schooled ensemble, or– in one instance where a bagpiper squared off animatedly against someone playing a wooden recorder– like an improved production of Riverdance.
Behind this sonic set piece stood
Yo Yo Ma himself. Yes, stood. He’d gotten up from his accustomed cello chair and delightedly mixing it up with the percussionists. His expression was merry, his rhythms precise, his role as welcomer and exemplar of the 2011 International Festival of Arts & Ideas assured.

“We’ re the lead in the soil! We’re the contaminants!”
That’s the dirt on the Sucking Ragweed, whose mission is to infiltrate sets by other bands and add their own distinctive bursts of percussion, brass and guitar frenzy.
But get this: they do it by appointment, with the full approval of the invaded acts.
“We’re not vandals,” says SR co-founder Rag Rob, a master of mixed metaphors. “We’re more like parasites. We want to play along, but we have our own ideas.”
We first saw the Sucking Ragweed when they joined the Rocking Rock Pirates of Rocky Rock (or whatever they can legally call themselves these days) onstage just a few weeks ago at the Bullfinch. But they’ve apparently been around for a while now, first planting themselves in the nu-jazz scene. “There, we felt redundant,” Rob says. Among the rocks, the weeds stood out.
This collective of sidemen, who deny that they are a band themselves, follow a carefully crated list of objectives, which begins “First, do no harmony.”

They’re not there merely to enhance an arrangement. But neither are they advocating musical destruction. They don’t jam, and they don’t jam a wrench in a show. So what do they do exactly? Find out Friday at the Bullfinch—the first Sucking Ragweed weekend incursion and their biggest show yet, leeching off none other than The Blats. Kudos to Sonny and his Blatmates for making the gracious offer.

Case 21, Ultra the Multi-Alien and A True Tale from Saucer Country at the Bullfinch… Multi-culti acoustic ambient shindig at Hamilton’s with Ulla Laroo, Trao Raagan and Ace Arn, sponsored by the International Studies department of the college on the hill… An Evening with Strange Adventures at D’Ollaire’s. Bring a helmet…

Gar blew up last night. Says we’ve been ignoring him. It’s true, except for how hard he is to ignore.

Sarabeth Tucek, Get Well Soon

Concept albums about grief and loss have taken many forms, from Pink Floyd to Eels. In this meditation on the death of a parent, Sarabeth Tucek takes a popular whispers-in-dark-rooms route, but the calm is filled in by swooping ethereal sounds which help you recall her contributions to the much more hellish psychedelic swirlings of Brian Jonestown Massacre a decade or so ago. There has been much water under the bridge apparently since then, and this album represents a self-reflective, analytical emergence from a devil-may-care youth that apparently became just plain dark. The little sonic accents and details are much appreciated, and help universalize this personal saga. The album’s cover depicts an empty boat adrift in a lake, but luckily the record itself is firmly grounded in mad melodies (the poppy yet emotionally complex “State I Am”), roiling rock instrumentals (“Exit Ghost”) and clear expressions of despair and (phew!) hopefulness.

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.

Millie wanted to start a local band yearbook, but balked when she realized how many bands she didn’t even like would have to be in it.

Likewise, ace band-flyer designer Billy Morris was all fired up to do a family tree of local bands, identifying all those musicians (mostly bassists) who’ve forged oft- unlikely connections between different bands in our incestuous scene. But Billy hit the same wall Millie did: too many bad bands clothing up the research.

Rather than torching Hamilton’s and eradicating the unsavory element altogether (Kidding! Kidding!), Mill and Bill are simultaneously pooling their resources and lowering their standards. Her band, the Model Marvels, and his, The Type Set, are gigging together next Wednesday at the Bullfinch. They’ll set up a sign-up sheet next to the merch table. If you want to assure that you’ll be listed in the first edition of Who’s Muso in our little scene, fill out an info form. Saves them research time, kickstarts the directory, gives the whole project a fighting chance.

In fact, here’s a form right here. ’cause you know who’s been bird into helping with the typing on this encyclopedia:

Band:

Members:

Where you rehearse:

What you sound like:

What you look like:

Where you’ve played:

Thing you’re proudest of:

What you want to change about your band:

Best band moment:

Best thing about our little scene:

But of course, if you’d rather fill this in at home and not venture out to the Bullfinch for such a mellifluous bill as is planned for next Wednesday, well, then we know you have no clue what to write for that last survey query above.

Everything old is new again: Siam how lonesome I am, Dog-Gone Dangerous Girl and the Rolling Chairs at the Bullfinch… Kangaroo Hop, Wake Up America and  Bantam Step at Hamilton’s. Oh, rah rah already—July’s a long way off still, gang… Tiddle-de-Winks, Havanola, and So long Sammy—aka the celebrated Where Journeys End tour—at D’ollaires. Bring papers…

Mar and I made time for each other. Had coffee between our shifts, then sat up talking until we passed out.

Robert Pollard, Lord of the Birdcage

Doesn’t he sound like ‘80s Bowie now? Definitely removed from the regrouped Guided by Voices sound, more songwriterly and less concerned with pushy solos by other players. The songs with the best titles—“Garden Smarm,” “Ash Ript Telecopter,” “Silence Before Violence”—tend to the be the weakest overall, strangely. Pollard’s legendarily self-derivative prolificity is definitely a liability here. But as someone who only recently came to a real understanding of Pollard’s extraordinary influence on a whole generation of indie upstarts, this is a document worth studying, particularly for its philosophical airs and profound lack of swagger.

Didn’t even know they’d died until I heard about concerts being held in their memory. Takes the chill off, a bit, to have a music show be the obit.

I ran into the eminent local band booster James Velvet last Saturday afternoon at Clark’s restaurant. (James greatly misses Clark’s Dairy, which closed last year, but has acclimated to the other Clark’s.) He mentioned that he would be playing the  next night at the Outer Space, a multi-act bill in honor of Norman Cross.

I knew Norman a little, many years ago. I’d been deeply attached to a cassette album of his—bluesy pop tunes where the blues never got away from the pop. I played it nonstop at work and eventually sought him out.

We weren’t made to be friends, not even in an opposites-attract kind of way. Back then, he struck me as one of the most brash, overconfident people I’d ever met. When I was working in the press office at City Hall during the Daniels administration, I was asked by the mayor’s staff if I knew Norman Cross. He’d apparently called some sort of gathering of artists to hear the mayor’s proposals for the future (it was an election year). All I could tell them was that I knew Norman, that I knew he knew a lot of artists and had some standing in the community, but that also with Norman you never knew what to expect. I went along with the mayor’s contingent for the discussion, held at the old Artspace on Whitney Avenue. Only four or five people were there, none of them part of the sort of arts community I’m sure the mayor was expecting. The look of the faces of the City Hall folks was priceless—they were already chewing themselves out for letting this happen, had already written it off as a waste of time. But Norman acted as if this was exactly the meeting he’d intended. If he’d expected more people, or less, or a more structured encounter, he never let on. He badgered the mayor up close about what could be done for artists like himself.  We all like to think that the average citizen should have the ear of civic leaders. Norman expected it.

He had all sorts of grand visions like that, some of which I considered ludicrous. Except he kept making them happen.

He built a home recording studio that has often been described to me by those who recorded there as just a wonderful place to work. He found galleries to show his artwork. Ultimately, while I came to learn that his pie-in-the-sky were nothing I needed to get worked up about. What I came most to respect about him was how he built himself a life where he could actively pursue his art. That he did so in New Haven is a credit to that city.

Norman had suffered from a host of mental and physical ailments in the years leading up to his death on March 6 the age of 61. Last year, the ever-supportive local musician and music-series host Frank Critelli (along with Shandy Lawson and Roger Arnold) helped Norman create his final album. Sunday’s tribute concert has passed, but I’m playing that album (Ain’t It the Truth) and digging in the basement for that old cassette.

**

I celebrated Max Wilk in print back in 2004, with a cover story for the New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly recalling “When Connecticut Was Cool.” It acknowledged such Nutmeg-nurtured pop-culture legends as Max Shulman, Terry Southern, Walt Kelly… and Max Wilk.

I’ve been an admirer of Max Wilk for nearly my entire life, and never suspected how much I didn’t know about him until reading the obits following his death Feb. 19 at the age of 90. His jazz side, for instance.

I personally associate Max Wilk with The Beatles and with Broadway. I first noted his name when I was eight years old and plowing through the novelization of Yellow Submarine. Wilk was a co-author of the fab cartoon’s screenplay and the author of its book version. Over the years I’d find other reasons to read him: He wrote a novel on which a Jerry Lewis movie was based (Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River). He wrote one of the great books about the golden age of Hollywood screenwriters, with the greatest title: Schmucks With Underwoods. He wrote histories of the makings of the musicals Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, both of which had New Haven try-outs at the Shubert theater.

Sometimes he worked the same interests a few different ways: He co-wrote the memoirs of  famed agent Audrey Wood, then wrote a play about Wood’s relationship with Tennessee Williams. He wrote for television in the 1950s, compiled The Golden Age of Television: Notes from the Survivors in 1976 and wrote a dishy novel about the same era, A Tough Act to Follow, in 1985.

He seemed to have a handle on all the lively art forms of the 20^th century. Including jazz, apparently. A lot of Max Wilk’s Westport musician pals are coming out to mark his memory June 9 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Westport Arts Center Gallery. I’ve been the center a few times to review its gallery shows. It’s a  cozy and progressive spot, a bastion of intimacy and subtlety in an town too often stereotyped as grandiose and stuck in its ways. Wilk railed regularly against the stodgy upper classes and the sheeplike middle classes, so the WAC will serve nicely. Info here.