A Major Music Capitol 3/10/02

Alan Greenblatt

Washington was a major music capitol last Sunday, with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic at the Kennedy Center, the important classical pianist Earl Wild at the National Gallery of Art and the Artie Shaw band, led by Dick Johnson, at Clarendon Ballroom.

In the face of all this, we opted for Woodystock at Chief Ike's Mambo Room. This was a benefit for zero population growth, as it turned out, and the crowd was heavily Vermont, with lots of beards over plaid shirts and young girls who looked fresh and squeaky clean despite the facial piercings.

Close to a dozen local singer-songwriters took to the small stage, each performing one song by Woody Guthrie and then a pair of his or her own tunes. The Guthrie material sure holds up nicely. This was an abnormally attentive crowd, but it was still interesting to hear an audience in 2002 laugh at his "Philadelphia Lawyer." The inevitable closing "This Land Is Your Land" was a little sloppy but fun. After all, that tune was written as a rejoinder to the heavy-handed boosterism of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," and so should be heard more often.

The singing and guitar playing and banjo playing was all strictly ordinary but mostly pleasant. (Is "BanjerDan" really a name that's going to catapult you to the top of the music biz?) They were all quite earnest, of course, saying things like "We love your vision," and there was probably one or two too many witless songs about how America is a land of over-consumption. Not too newsy on that score. The worst rhyme was written by a local schoolteacher named Eric Maring, who closed a song with

Yeah, I was really digging on Olivia Newton-John in "Grease"

Yeah, the world sits in chaos, the pope sits in peace.

The moral of the story, I think, is that sometimes it's better to make the effort to leave your own neighborhood and hear better music that might cost you a little more.

I'm going to give Wayne Shorter short shrift here but wanted to note how challenging his concert at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater was last week. This guy could coast on an impressive reputation but is still exploring the far reaches of the music. He's billed as a jazz artist, but the music he made would have fit nicely at a new music festival dominated by the likes of Phillip Glass and John Adams.

You might hear the shortest snatch of a familiar melody such as "Footprints," but Shorter would take that snatch and repeat it and twist it into a series of peppery little notes, like he was hypnotized. His playing on tenor sax was particularly short and choppy, while his soprano work contained longer phrases.

John Patitucci played bass as if he was pushing hard against something, drummer Brian Blade was wiry and insistent and pianist Danilo Perez kept it all glued together and provided the best visual of the night, hitting the strings in the guts of the piano with a plastic water bottle.