Hit home 3 a.m. Thursday from ten days in Los Angeles. Baking bread (no recipes, just winging it with a whole wheat loaf and a spelt sourdough of my own devising). Walking the dogs (A man just said, “Corgis?! They look a bit shy in the paw!”). Changing the hamster cage. Catching up on The Archers. And when family is home, spending every moment with them. Asked Sally if she wanted to go to the library after school, and she said “You just read my mind.”

The Mazz Hats pulled off a neat trick Tuesday at the Bullfinch, thanks to a devoted fan. Everyone in the house was wearing hats–the same kind of hat. Mazz hats.
What’s a Mazz hat? Well, obviously, a disturbing play on words. But it’s also now a sort of baseball cap with a hole cut out of the top. Plus antlers.

The hats are the creation of Hildie Grey, who’s doing a self- styled degree in “rock costumery” at the college on the hill.

So what on earth got folks to put these on their heads? Well, peer pressure never works at the proud misfit fiesta known as the Finch. But beer pressure does.
The colorful Ms. Grey bought a round for the whole house (and had to make it two or three rounds for a couple of the humorous, but ssssshhhhh, don’t tell the others). How could a starving student afford such a thing? Well, for starters the bartenders announced a drink special (they love these world-record type events). But get this, a student grant for fashion designers was also involved. Money well worn.

The Harleans, Boyer and Heads of Banks at the Bullfinch… Shove Alley Yeah! and More Barry doing the movie star pop strut at Hamilton’s… But, we are surprised to admit, best booking of the night is the neoclassical new wave of Debussy Fields and the Gypsy Roses, playing for the first time anywhere near town– which, considering those bands’ indie/ college pedigree, is downright remarkable…

Broke out what was left of the liquor-flavored taffy from weeks ago. Disgusting. Gar ate most of it.

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…