Brenda Marie and the Tiger

(12 May 2023, Milo's)

The successful are obsessed. They bring joy. Indeed, in society that functions well, an important dimension of success is the ability to bring joy; one cannot be successful in abstract, without giving others what they want. (In society that functions poorly, one can find success by destroying competitors and by destroying value, without ever giving anything in return.)

Brenda Marie and the Tiger are perfectly matched. The Tiger is a consummate pianist with an acute sense of timing. Brenda Marie lives every song.

People become artists and entrepreneurs in order to retain creative control over their lives, in spite of the  risk of penury. Brenda and Tiger are in full control. At least for the duration of the performance, they are free, and the audience gets a taste of freedom, too.

Ja Tevis Nebūtu...

 (Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 24 July 2021)

A plaque on a building that was JFK's home in Riga for a couple of days in 1939 attributes to him the poetic observation "Latvians will always reach upwards." True to JFK's prophecy, Raimonds Pauls and Elīna Garanča created new music and reinterpreted old music for the evening, instead of choosing to recycle their old hits. One can ever hope to go far only if one keeps walking. The evening illustrates how come both have gone so far and why they fully deserve the acclaim.

Ainars Mielavs

(Mūzikas nams Daile, 29 December 2019)

Mielavs is a musician---a city musician, perhaps, for he treats music as a complex emergent phenomenon, a collaborative effort, akin to a city quarter, that cannot be planned and mastered by each participant in isolation. Mielavs's voice is just one of several instruments in the band, and is more for it.

He loathes repeating himself. It must be that he has not figured out life yet. He wants it to continue.

The first of the three new songs he sang will become a hit.

Baltā Pasaka

(Latvijas Nacionālais teātris, 21 December 2019)

Even before the curtain rises, one can recognise the pianist---the percussionist. Each note has a life of its own, slightly displaced in time and clearly articulated. It is this recognition of the individuality of each note note that makes their union an emergent experience. The notes collaborate because they want to, not because they have been straightjacketed into submission by rules or technology.

Raimonds Pauls is a jazz musician. Jazz is a pursuit of happiness through freedom and conversation.

3 Osokins

(Dzintari Concert Hall, 25 July 2019)

Sergejs Osokins’s every keystroke has a life of its own, executed nearly staccato, perfectly timed, and with just the right strength. In that, his classical piano resembles jazz piano (of Raimonds Pauls’s variety); it is decidedly twenty-first century.

There is a reason to keep performing traditional classical music, a reason that does not confuse art with a mere sport competition in the exercise of a narrow vocabulary. A musical piece is a dance whose moves the musical score can codify only roughly. Successive performers build on earlier discoveries and, by doing so, create a slightly different, ever more perfect piece.

Ainars Mielavs

(Mūzikas nams Daile, 30 December 2018)

The band is excellent. They actually know how to play (rock, rockabilly, country) and, true to the spirit of their art, appear to harbour no suicidal tendencies (at least not on stage, not by boredom). The vocalist, continental, is just the right mixture of parochial and worldly to please the small-town unprovincial urbanites in attendance.

The urbanites in question are the southerners of the north, not the northerners of the south.

Kurt Vonnegut’s observation (recalled by Mielavs) that, if left to themselves, individuals live out their lives as stories is by now experimentally confirmed and has both a positive and a normative appeal. While one should enjoy many a moment the way one enjoys a good meal, for its instantaneous gratification, when a meal is unwelcome or inaccessible, a good story (or its anticipation or its memory) is a valuable diversion, if not a lesson.

It is unclear whether individuals devote excessive or insufficient effort to writing their life stories. On the one hand, a good story nourishes many and serves as a prologue for future stories. On the other hand, one can overindulge in Instagramable storytelling at the expense of living, the same way that one can overindulge in eating.

Vonnegut also opines that countries, in contrast to individuals, most certainly should not pursue story telling. Vonnegut is right. Good institutions would encourage both the government and private citizens to undertake long-term investments that would coalesce in a non-trivial narrative, a good story. But this story would be a byproduct of good institutions, not an extrinsic goal imposed by the country’s rulers. If a country needs a narrative on which to bring up its citizens, it will do better by inventing this narrative rather than by putting generations of its citizens through living it.

When at loss, one can crowdsource one’s storyline by drastically changing one’s environment. Repeat.

Hazmat Modine

(Terra Blues, 29 September 2018)

One should take care to live, not merely survive. It helps if one enjoys doing what one is doing---or at least enjoys the company of the fellow travellers---as one is trying to climb aboard. It is a jungle. The winners deserve their victory, but so do many losers. The net beneficiaries are the tourists, who are not required to fight on the turf whose fruits they consume. Everyone is a tourist tasting the fruits of the frustrations of past generations.

The band has perfected the blues and then has taken it two steps further. The timing is impeccable. The passion is genuine. The anger is genuine.

SnowApple

(Foro del Tejedor, 5 November 2016)

Ambassadors of the periodically unfashionable country of frontiersman, artists, characters, the citizens of the world, they are. It is the country whose governments compete to seduce, whose hymn has a melody to it, whose languages evolve, compete, absorb, whose elite is nonhierarchical.

Clare Means

(The Third Street Promenade, 20 April 2013)

An artist cannot help being, and translating who he is into a narrative. If one finds aspects of beauty in oneself and translates these, one succeeds as an artist.

Few are artists. While some are tall buildings and fluid fabrics, others are merely a smooth gait, a wit, a reassuring profile. Nevertheless, most can find gratification in distilling a part of themselves into the beauty that can be passed on, onto the audience of strangers. One creates when the external narrative is either lacking or inspires a dialogue.

There is wisdom in being but a reporter---not a schemer, nor a moralist, nor a nostalgist---especially when one is of the age when one is supposed to be alive. One gets only one chance at being oneself, followed by numerous an opportunity for revising the account of what one used to be.

Singing on the River

(Trinity College Cambridge, 6 June 2010)

Melancholy shuns neither misery nor comfort. In misery, it inspires despair; in comfort, it inspires beauty. Despair is forgotten, beauty is immortal. He who finds comfort may live on through beauty, in songs centuries old, in voices young and happy.

New York Philharmonic New Year’s Eve Concert with Thomas Hampson

(Avery Fisher Hall, 31 December 2009)

The soloist, Thomas Hampson, keeps a distance between himself, a baritone opera singer, and the characters that he voices. Even when the distance is minimal (as in Cole Porter's "Where is the Life that Late I Led?"), the voice comes across foremost as a musical instrument, only then as an individual.

In symphony orchestras, in contrast to jazz bands, players take no visible initiative in creating the mood; only the conductor innovates. Furthermore, bound by tradition, the conductor innovates minimally, without changing the arrangement. Hence, it may be too much to expect Alan Gilbert to improvise and swing it in every work, but more passion in his interpretations would be admissible. Adherence to the tradition was entirely appropriate, however, in the Yuletide hymn, conducted by Gilbert and sung by all present to conclude the night.

Porter and Gershwin, two of the three featured composers, have become most American by trying not to be such and failing at it. In the programme, their work outshines most of Copeland's, except his song "Simple Gifts."

Chris Botti

(Blue Note, 1 January 2010)

Excessive percussions often dominate the piano. Intimacy is disturbed by amplification. The last song, "One for My Baby," benefits from being performed by just a piano and a trumpet, without amplification. The evening, however, is redeemed by Chris Botti's gentlemanly solos and duos.

Vince Giordano and Nighthawks

(3 August 2009, Club Cache)

Neither an imitation nor a tribute, but a snapshot of one of the many epochs that develop in parallel in the city. The band and the patrons live their parts with flair.