Live review:
A Night of the Beats at Disney Hall
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/12/live-review-a-night-of-the-beats-at-disney-hall.html
Bebop and beat intersect in an uneven pairing of musicians and poets.
December 9, 2009
by Chris Barton
It was difficult to know what to expect going into the Night of the
Beats concert at Disney Hall on Tuesday night. In this final
performance in the West Coast, Left Coast festival, the only sure
thing was a celebration of the intersection of bebop and beat poetry,
two wildly fertile movements that often fed off each other in the 1950s.
Offering a lineup split between the worlds of both jazz and poetry,
the evening began with a curious program change that shifted the
always engaging Charles Lloyd New Quartet to an opening slot.
While this left more time for a supergroup of sorts featuring Joshua
Redman, Christian McBride and Alan Broadbent, who were supporting a
series of spoken-word performances, Lloyd's time onstage was an
all-too-brief introduction. Still, it best captured the free-wheeling
spirit of the night's theme.
Things started unsteadily, as the quartet teamed with poet Michael
McClure, who performed with Allen Ginsberg at his first reading of
"Howl" in San Francisco.
Frequently characterized as an inspiration for Jim Morrison, the
silver-maned McClure gestured dramatically to the band and the
audience during a piece called "Maybe Mama Lion," but his words often
struggled to find harmony with the music.
The finger-snapping stereotype of beat poetry's association with jazz
has been a target of parody by generations of comedians, but
McClure's second reading quickly transcended such associations.
Coalescing behind Lloyd's flute and a dry, head-bobbing groove from
drummer Eric Harland, "Ghost Tantras" showed how this
cross-pollination of disciplines paved the way for the jazz-informed
hip-hop of Digible Planets and A Tribe Called Quest.
Yet as quickly as the band found its footing and opened up the
throttle further with extended all-instrumental excursions and an
introspective piece that featured a spiritually inquisitive reading
by Lloyd, its time was over.
The results for the evening's later pairings were far more uneven.
After the all-star band took the stage, poet David Meltzer read
Ginsberg's fiery, funny "America," but the musicians' fairly
conventional blues backdrop never approached the same passion as
Ginsberg's words, even as it at times overshadowed them.
Exene Cervenka never seemed entirely comfortable in her readings as
the band touched on period-appropriate music from Miles Davis and
Sonny Rollins.
She came into her own with a martial take on "Mercedes Benz" that
allowed her twangy vocal style to shine in the piece that was
originally written by McClure and later popularized by Janis Joplin.
After McClure returned for a set that culminated with an
unfortunately boisterous reading from the work of Morrison (always a
divisive choice), the night belonged to the man who turned out to be
its secret weapon: Kurt Elling.
Opening with a reverent bow toward the poets seated onstage, Elling
evinced a gregarious charisma and an actor's gift for performance
during energetic readings from Kerouac's "American Haikus" and
Gregory Corso's "Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday," which featured
a lovely piano accompaniment by Broadbent.
Closing with a gleefully sneering, raspy take on William S.
Burroughs' "Words of Advice for Young People," Elling's full-throated
blast of humor and warmth allowed the music and words to share the
stage as equals.
It was a feeling the event reached for all night but often struggled
to capture.
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