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Winter Jazzfest 2015

Leeway replied to Leeway's topic in Live Shows & Festivals

Here's my show list. The schedules are far from perfect, just what I can make out of available options. There are some overlaps/tight time crunches, but if I like something I'll stay put, if not, I'll head for a back-up session. I plan to see ICP in Baltimore tomorrow night, before I come up to NYC, so they are not on the list. Time/Performance/Venue FRIDAY 6:30 – Donald Byrd Electric and Acoustic - LPR 7:30- David Murray Clarinet – Minetta 8:00 – Russ Johnson (Eric Dolphy) – Judson 9:15 – Dave Douglas – Judson 10:00 – Trio 3 w/Vijay Iyer – Minetta 11:00 – Kris Davis Infrasound –Subculture 12:15 – Uri Caine/Bennink – Subculture 1:00 - Improv Duets SATURDAY 6:30 – Myra Melford Snowy Egret -Zinc 7:45 – Mark Turner – Zinc 8:15 – Darius Jones – Players 9:30 – Fujiwara Hookup - _Players 10:00 – Mahanthappa Bird Calls 12:00 – Eivind Opsvik - Players

January 6, 2015
56 replies
- January 2015

Now reading...

Leeway replied to ghost of miles's topic in Miscellaneous - Non-Political

More on Fitzgerald, from a blog I happen to read occasionally. Meanwhile, I am firmly locked in Clarissa's embrace! "The problem that I’m having with Penelope Fitzgerald’s late novels is that their excellence, their extraordinary agility, is almost ephemeral, because the books are so short. It took no time at all to read The Gate of Angels, which I loved while I was reading it but now have trouble remembering, only a few hours later. I have trouble remembering why I liked it. I still remember why I liked — loved — Innocence: I was captured by its insouciant but quite genuine Italian quality; the novel deserves an entry in that catalogue, Sprezzatura. The Beginning of Spring did not appeal to anything like the same extent. I felt, not without chuckling amusement, as though Ivy Compton-Burnett were taking over the translation of a Russian classic from Constance Garnett. If Innocence struck me as echt, The Beginning of Spring felt pastiche. This distinction is simply a reflection of my very different regard for things Italian and Russian. To me, Russia is a version of the Wild-West United States that hasn’t got the sense to use the Latin alphabet. My dislike of the prelates of Orthodoxy is unsurpassed, at least by other dislikes. What did interest me about The Beginning of Spring was its strange echo of imperialism. The hero, Frank Reid, is British by background but Russian by birth. Frank was educated in Russia and speaks perfect Russian. Had the setting been India, this fluency would have been unlikely, as would have been the local education. The management of a printing works is an almost stereotypically imperial sort of business, but whatever its commercial activities might have been, Britain never subjected Russia to its yoke; on the contrary, Russia ran its own empire, and vied with Britain for mastery in Central Asia. All the clichés of empire — the alluring, the dangerous, the unintelligible, the backward — are present in The Beginning of Spring, but they are set in what in music would be called a remote key. With its English setting — London and Cambridge, also in 1912 — The Gate of Angelsis extremely familiar, more familiar than it might be if I hadn’t read all the mystery novels of Charles Todd last year. The fictional enterprise of creating a fictional Oxbridge college for the purposes of satire is as comfortable as my favorite napping blanket — and that’s a problem. This is where I think the novel undercuts itself: there is no need in this love story for the extremity of St Angelicus College, and the gratuitousness of the creation is highlighted at the finale, when Daisy Saunders, ever the capable conscientious nurse, violates the college’s male-only hygeine, explicitly likened to that of Mount Athos, in order to relieve the “syncope” of the blind master, whom she finds prostrate at the foot of the tiny quad’s solitary tree. The dons who cluck at her presence are ineffectual hens, and it turns out that Fred Fairly, the junior fellow whose passionate devotion to Daisy powers the plot, is not even on the premises. St Angelicus gives Fitzgerald the pretext for a delightful retelling of the synopsis of La Favorita, the opera about antipope Benedict XIII, only (tellingly) without the Favorite. But that’s about all it’s good for. The solidly stimulating writing about the (quite real) Cavendish Laboratory makes the imaginary college even flufflier. Now that I’ve dissed The Gate of Angels, I remember, and like, it better."

January 6, 2015
9,346 replies

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