By Tom Ineck

LINCOLN, Neb.—For the second consecutive year, the popular Jazz in June concert series will feature five Tuesday evening performances. Considering the hit-an-miss nature of live jazz in Lincoln during the rest of the year, that is a very good thing for fans of the music.

As in recent years, the Berman Music Foundation will play a major role in sponsoring the series, now in its 19^th year. Each 7 p.m. concert routinely draws thousands to the sculpture garden outside Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Four of the five artists in the 2010 lineup have performed in Lincoln and have ties to the BMF.

Trumpeter Darryl White returns to the stage June 1 with a group resembling the one he fronted two years ago. Featured again are pianist Jeff Jenkins of Denver, bassist Craig Akin of New York and drummer Brandon Draper of Kansas City, Mo. The new addition is veteran saxophonist Dick Oatts, who over the last 30 years has performed and recorded with such greats as Lou Rawls, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Joe Henderson, Red Rodney, Joe Lovano, Eddie Gomez, and Jack McDuff. He also has seven recordings under his own name on the Steeplechase label.

In conjunction with a celebration of Cuban culture at Sheldon, the San Diego-based combo Otro Mundo will perform June 8. Blending the sounds of Brazil, Spain, the United States, Cuba, Africa, and the Middle East, Otro Mundo is a five-piece outfit consisting of founders Dusty Brough on guitar, Kevin Freeby on bass, and Steve Haney on percussion. Flutist and vocalist Rebecca Kleinmann and drummer Julien Cantelm recently joined the band. Their debut, self-titled recording was released in February.

Singer Angela Hagenbach of Kansas City will front a sextet June 15. A longtime favorite in Lincoln, she has appeared here many times over the last 15 years, most recently as a guest artist with the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra at the 2007 Jazz in June. The BMF has followed her career with enthusiasm, covering performances in Lincoln and in her hometown, as well as reviewing her recordings. Backing her sultry vocals will be saxophonist Matt Otto, guitarist Danny Embrey, pianist Roger Wilder, bassist Steve Rigazzi and drummer Doug Auwarter. For our review of her current release, “The Way They Make Me Feel,” click here.

Jeff Newell’s New-Trad Octet will bring their unique blend of jazz innovation and brass band tradition to the Jazz in June stage June 22. Newell last performed here in January 2006, when the saxophonist appeared as a guest artist with the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra and the following night with a small group at P.O. Pears. The octet also will feature Victor Garcia on trumpet, Ryan Shultz on bass trumpet, Mike Hogg on tuba, Steve Million on keyboards, Neal Alger on guitar, Tim Fox on bass and Rick Vitek on drums. Read an account of our recent interview with Newell above.

After five years, jazz and jazz fusion guitar great Jerry Hahn returns to Lincoln June 29 with a quartet also featuring Kansas City stalwarts Joe Cartwright on piano, Tyrone Clarke on bass and Mike Warren on drums. Born in Alma, Neb., the fretmaster grew up in Wichita, Kan., before moving away for a few decades to record and tour with saxophonist John Handy, vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonist Bennie Wallace, bassist David Friesen and many others. In the early 1970s, he also led the ground-breaking Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. He returned to the Wichita area in 2004 and now lives in Lenexa, Kan. The BMF and Dietze Music House brought Hahn to Lincoln in February 2005 for guitar workshops and a trio performance at P.O. Pears. To read an interview we did with Hahn at that time, click here. For reviews of those appearances, click here.

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Editor's Note: After two members of the band were killed in an auto accident in late March, King Sunny Ade and his African Beats cancelled the first half of their tour, including the Lincoln date. Instead, a free World Music Benefit was held at the Bourbon Theatre. Acts included Masoud Mahjouri-Samani of Iran performing solo on the six-stringed tar; the Alash ensemble, a quartet of Tuvan throat singers; Son Del Llano, a local group performing Cuban son and salsa music; and Ashanti, an African roots band playing soca, highlife, reggae and soul music, including cover versions of King Sunny Ade songs as a tribute to the fallen members of his band.

By Tom Ineck

LINCOLN, Neb.—King Sunny Adé and His African Beats should be thoroughly warmed up and well settled into their 2010 North American tour by the time they arrive at the Bourbon Theatre for an April 18 performance, a benefit for KZUM Community Radio.

The tour begins exactly one week earlier, with an April 11 concert in Montreal. Additional shows in Toronto, Ann Arbor, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis will prepare the 16-piece band for its Lincoln appearance at the Bourbon, 1415 O St., where the 6 p.m. concert promises to be the music event of the year. Doors open at 5 p.m.

The Berman Music Foundation is a principal sponsor of the concert. Local Cuban and salsa band Son Del Llano will perform as the opening act.

Click on the poster to the right for ticket information.

The undisputed king of “juju music,” Adé has been honored with titles like “Chairman of the Board” and “Minister of Enjoyment” in his home country of Nigeria, and his crossover popularity has earned him billing as “the African Bob Marley.” Juju music is a dance-inspiring hybrid of western pop and traditional African music with roots in the guitar tradition of Nigeria. A hypnotic blend of electric guitars, pedal-steel guitar, synthesizers and multi-layered percussion, it found wide favor in the 1970s when Adé combined Yoruba drumming with elements of West African highlife music, calypso, and jazz. Adé also brought many other innovations to the traditional sound and presentation.

“When I met juju music musicians were still sitting down, with instruments arranged in front,” Adé says in his official biography. “I found it hard because I knew people were not getting full value for their money. So I started standing and dancing. I moved the instruments backwards to allow them enjoy their money and gave my boys a microphone each to dance and sing. At that time too, they were playing only one guitar. I increased to two, three, four, five and the present six. I dropped the use of the accordion and introduced keyboards, the manual jazz drum and now the electronic jazz drum. I introduced the use of pedal steel otherwise known as Hawaiian guitar, increased the percussion aspect of the music, added more talking drums, introduced computer into juju music and de-emphasized the use of high tone in the vocals.” 

Adé and His African Beats created a worldwide sensation in the early 1980s with three recordings on Mango Records—“Juju Music” (1982), “Synchro System” (1983), and “Aura” (1984). He was the first African to be nominated twice for a Grammy Award, first for “Synchro System” and most recently for “Odu,” a 1998 collection of traditional Yoruba songs. In July 2009 he was inducted into the Afropop Hall of Fame.

After their Lincoln performance, the African Beats will continue with scheduled stops in St. Louis., Houston and New Orleans, where they will perform April 25 at the popular New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Lincoln is one of the smallest cities on the six-week tour, which also includes Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

The April 18 Lincoln concert is made possible by Star City Blog with additional support from Southeast Community College, Dietze Music, U.S. Bank, The Holiday Inn Downtown, and the Parthenon Greek Taverna and Grill. Net proceeds will be donated to KZUM.

Tickets are $25 for general admission, $50 for reserved seats. To purchase tickets, visit Star City Blog at www.starcityblog.com.

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Clawfoot House brings lively arts to the hood

By Tom Ineck

LINCOLN, Neb.—Ember Schrag is living, lively and music-loving proof that one inspired person with a passion can make a difference.

In Schrag’s case, that passion is for making music and sharing the music of others with the Lincoln community. For seven years, she had been guiding her own music career and—like many other local artists—struggling to find venues, booking gigs, traveling and recording. A North Platte native and UNL graduate who majored in English and music, Schrag considered a move to the Pacific Northwest to immerse herself in Portland’s music scene, but she decided to stay in Lincoln to await the arrival of daughter Lillian.

Her inspiration was to create a venue out of her own home, a rental duplex in Lincoln’s Everett neighborhood that she christened Clawfoot House. She began working with Bryan Day, an improviser, inventor and “sound sculptor” who also runs Public Eyesore Records. Day had extensive experience in the music business worldwide. That led to a series of house concerts featuring experimental music, which eventually morphed into other genres.

With Day’s connections and experience gained by promoting her own shows over the years, Schrag turned 1042 F St. into a house concert stage for other musicians. She opened the doors to the public in January 2009, promising and delivering a homey space with low admissions and high-quality acts. In its first year, Schrag booked some 45 acts there, a notable accomplishment considering that she still performs, works full-time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is raising an infant daughter.

“I’m really busy,” she said in a recent phone interview conducted while Lillian napped. “But Clawfoot House is so much fun, and Lincoln really had a need for this, or it wouldn’t have come out of nowhere and suddenly become this big thing.”

Clawfoot House quickly established a reputation for adventurous booking, ranging from avant-garde improvisation, indie-folk and traditional old-timey artists to a classical quartet, poetry readings, theater, workshops, lectures, puppet shows, jugglers and visual artists. Nothing is out of the question, as long as it gives voice to artistic expression, a philosophy summed up in the Clawfoot mission statement: “We strive to provide hospitality and fair pay for talented artists—locals and those on tour—who perform at Clawfoot House, as we believe these individuals deserve support for the risks they take to make their art and bring it to us.”

It is a mission not unlike that of the Berman Music Foundation, established 15 years ago: “The foundation realizes the difficulties involved in maintaining a career as an artist and will assist those individuals who yearn to create according to their own hearts and not simply to become a commercial success. The foundation, touched by the spirit of all the musicians who seek to present and preserve American music, will strive diligently to illuminate the pathway to a long-lasting, deep appreciation of music, in all its forms and hues.”

That common goal recently resulted in a $2,200 BMF grant to Schrag for a series of presentations by Seattle-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Amy Denio, in collaboration with the UNL Women’s Center. Denio’s Lincoln stay included a luncheon presentation on “Music and Social Change” at the UNL Student Union, an evening performance at Clawfoot House and a special edition of the monthly Clawfoot Salon, featuring Denio in a lecture and performance. Grace Sankey Berman attended Denio’s appearance at the salon and offers her account elsewhere in this newsletter.

The salon, another Schrag inspiration, is a gathering of female musicians and artists who share knowledge, exchange views, receive feedback on new work and jam. A lecture series offer aspects of the history of women in the arts and skills useful to women artists.

“It seems there aren’t as many opportunities for female musicians to learn from other women about technical stuff and other things. I just thought that would be really cool to create a situation where they can learn from each other and also play music, all together. The jam, with women, is very different, very organic. It’s very communal.”

Schrag added an occasional Front Porch Potluck Grill that brings together musicians, friends and neighbors for a common purpose. Recently, she has been shepherding Clawfoot House through the arduous process of incorporating as a non-profit organization. Perhaps most important in directing an intimate, low-budget, live music venue with little hope of ever turning a profit, Schrag loves her work.

“I really like doing it. I really like curating the series. I like picking stuff out and bringing good music together to share it with other people. And the performers appreciate it. That’s a big part of the reason why things have gone so well. Performers really want to have that kind of experience. Increasingly, even big-name performers want to do house shows because you connect with people better.”

Lincoln’s location, midway between Denver and Chicago, makes it a logical stop for artists on the road, a fact that Schrag and others have capitalized on. In fact, she now gets at least one e-mail message every day from musicians seeking a gig in Lincoln.

“People want to play here,” she said. “This town can definitely support more house venues like this.” Last August alone, Schrag booked eight shows, often providing lodging and meals for musicians.

“There was one morning where I was making breakfast for a dozen men. I used two dozen eggs and four or five pots of coffee, and I was having such a good time! I know what it’s like to be on the road. We know that people appreciate a salad and some orange juice because it’s hard to get good food on the road.”

Once Clawfoot House has 501c3 status, it will be able to accept tax-deductible donations to offset some of those expenses and even expand the series of house concerts. Schrag and Day already are studying the possibility of bringing in experimental, avant-garde music artists from New York, Mexico City, China, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Clawfoot House audiences, she said, tend to be a little younger than the average LAFTA crowd, alluding to the Lincoln Association for Traditional Arts, the city’s longtime folk-music series of concerts. While some regulars are in their 50s, most are in their 20s.

“We have a little of the LAFTA atmosphere, but not the same kind of music. For the trouble that we’re taking to open up our home, we want to do something that’s really unique.” Schrag has an understanding with her landlord that allows the live music venue’s adventurous spirit to flourish.

“Since we have this community aspect, our landlord has decided that we’re actually doing the city a favor, we’re cleaning up the neighborhood and creating more positive vibes in the Everett neighborhood. He said he thinks the city owes us a thank-you, and he’s very supportive of what we’re trying to do.”

For more on Clawfoot House, visit www.clawfoothouse.com. For more on Schrag’s own music, go to www.emberschrag.com or www.myspace.com/smberschragmusic.

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By Tom Ineck

Jane Jarvis, a longtime friend of the Berman Music Foundation, died Jan. 25 at the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood, N.J. She was 94.

The Berman foundation first brought Jarvis to the attention of jazz fans in Lincoln, Neb., in 1997, when she appeared on March 9 at the Zoo Bar, sharing the billing with saxophonist Benny Waters, who was 95 at the time. Jane was a relatively young and sprightly 81. Indeed, she boasted of being a month younger than my mom when they were introduced during intermission.

During their stay, Jarvis also conducted master classes with students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and at Park Middle School in Lincoln. In October 1999, she returned to the city with trombonist Benny Powell and bassist Earl May for a benefit performance at the Cornhusker Hotel, funded in part by the BMF.

In a 1997 interview, she told me enthusiastically about her lifelong love of jazz.

"I'm not sure when I heard the first jazz recording. It could have been at an uncle's home. He had a phonograph. I didn't have a phonograph when I was a child. In fact, when I was young, not every family had a radio. But I did, for reasons I'm not able to explain, pick up immediately on everything I heard that was jazz, and studied it without knowing I was studying it, and cataloged it in my mind without being aware that I was putting it in my musical computer. I took advantage of everything I heard, and it influenced my playing."

Born Jane Nossett Jarvis on Oct. 31, 1915, Jane formed a jazz band in her native Indiana as a teenager, and continued to work as a jazz pianist from her mid-60s into her 90s. But for more than two decades she was best known as a ballpark organist, first with the Braves at County Stadium in Milwaukee, then at Shea Stadium from 1964 to 1979, mixing jazz tunes like “Scrapple from the Apple” with more conventional fare like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” She also worked for Muzak, eventually becoming vice president of programming and recording and hiring jazz musicians like Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry to record sessions that produced some swinging “elevator music.”

After leaving Muzak and the New York Mets in the late 1970s, she began finding gigs as a jazz pianist, eventually becoming a regular at Zinno, a West Village nightclub and restaurant, where she worked with Milt Hinton and other jazz bassists. She recorded her first album as a leader in 1985, the year she turned 70.

Jarvis had lived at the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home since she was forced out of her East Side apartment in 2008 after an adjacent building was destroyed in a crane collapse. Butch Berman had continued to stay in touch with Jane through the years, right up until his own death in January 2008.

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By Brad Krieger

The Second Annual Butch Berman Memorial Ping Pong tournament was hosted by Daniel Nelson, a long-time friend of the Berman Music Foundation.

Present at the gathering were Daniel Nelson, Dylan Nelson, Elizabeth Nelson, Ruth Ann Nahorny, Brad Krieger, Catherine Patterson, Bob Doris, and Miles Kildare.

For the past 30-plus years, we would gather at Butch’s house on Saturday or Sunday for a full-out assault on the Ping Pong table. Butch was always the gracious host, providing fine wine—and food, if it happened to be a football Saturday. We kept a running total on who won, and would have a final tally at the end of the year to see who wound up on top.

In the end, wins and losses were not important, but added to the excitement of the competition.

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Essay

Hearing the music, seeing the truth

The following essay was written for a class in African-American literature that I’m taking at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I wrote it after reading Ralph Ellison’s masterful and highly acclaimed novel “Invisible Man,” published in 1952. It was one of four short papers required by course instructor Megan Peabody. Since it deals with the use of music as a symbol throughout the book, I thought it appropriate for BMF readers. I also liked the idea of recycling the essay for a broader audience. I have altered the scholarly formatting and page citations for a more journalistic approach.  

By Tom Ineck

“Invisible Man” deals largely in symbolic imagery, the perceptions of others, self-observance and self-identity, but one way in which Ralph Ellison examines these visual concepts is through music, its multi-faceted influence throughout our lives and its impact on our emotions, our spiritual growth, the way we define ourselves, and our social and political consciousness. In the course of the novel, he cues important scenes with references to the melody, harmony, lyrics and rhythms of song, from such diverse sources as jazz recordings, a Christmas carol heard from a college chapel, a spontaneous expression of the blues and a funeral march in Harlem.

Attempting to describe his protagonist’s feelings of invisibility as he “hibernates” in his underground refuge from the real world, Ellison invokes the power of jazz as trumpeter Louis Armstrong sings and plays Fats Waller’s bluesy lament “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,” writing, “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.” Like Armstrong’s syncopated rhythm, being invisible, he notes, “gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.” He equates the visual with the aural when he writes, “…You hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” Even in the quandary of his invisibility, he defines the dilemma in terms of the racial colors of black and white.

A choir of trombones performing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” inside a college chapel inspires sadness in the passing listener. You can almost see the waves of music when Ellison writes, “The sound floats over all, clear like the night, liquid, serene, and lonely.” Less refined are the primitive spirituals sung in the chapel by a country quartet: “We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang, but since the visitors were awed we dared not laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds Jim Trueblood made as he led the quartet.” In psychic agony after he rapes his daughter, Trueblood spontaneously raises his voice in song, beginning with a spiritual. “I don’t know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin’ the blues. I sings me blues that night ain’t never been sang before, and while I’m singin’ them blues I makes up my mind that I ain’t nobody but myself and ain’t nothin’ I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen.” In the act of singing this primal music, he acknowledges the baseness of his nature and its ultimate consequences.

Ellison likens the delivery of a college debater to a brass ensemble, as he voices his argument in resonating tones, writing “…listen to me, the bungling bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombone’s timbre, playing thematic variations like a baritone horn.” During a choir performance, a girl rises to sing a cappella, “standing high against the organ pipes, herself become before our eyes a pipe of contained, controlled and sublimated anguish, a thin plain face transformed by music.” The loyal followers of a fallen black leader mourn his passing, “bugles weeping like a family of tender women lamenting their loved one. And the people came to sing the old songs and to express their unspeakable sorrow.” Failing to find words to describe their misery, music becomes the medium through which they articulate the fullness of their hearts.

The quest to find himself and his place in the world takes the protagonist to Harlem, where a funeral procession for a black leader is emblematic of the profound power of music in the lives of black Americans, and of all people. A lone, elderly male voice and a euphonium render an impromptu version of “There’s Many a Thousand Gone,” like “two black pigeons rising above a skull-white barn to tumble and rise through still, blue air.” Others take up the song, following the old man, “…as though the song had been there all the time and he knew it and aroused it; and I knew that I had known it too and had failed to release it out of a vague, nameless shame or fear. …I looked at the coffin and the marchers, listening to them, and yet realizing that I was listening to something within myself.” The old man’s song and its message seem to emanate from the listeners, as they respond to something beyond religion or politics. “It was not the words, for they were all the same old slave-borne words; it was as though he’d changed the emotion beneath the words while yet the old longing, resigned, transcendent emotion still sounded above, now deepened by that something for which the theory of Brotherhood had given me no name.”

Ellison’s protagonist eventually resigns himself to the diversity and absurdity of life, as in the contradictions inherent in the blues and its myriad variations or in Louis Armstrong’s evocations of palpable good and evil when he sings, “Open the window and let the foul air out… Of course Louis was kidding, he wouldn’t have thrown old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air’s horn that counted.” In other words, music tempered by the fires of hell may be the most heavenly sound of all.

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By Tom Ineck

As live music goes, 2010 is looking like an embarrassment of riches. And I’m not as easily embarrassed as I used to be.

If plans pan out, I will attend the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, April 29-May 2, and also cover the second week of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, June 7-13 in Northern California, where I had such a memorable visit last year. The 16-piece band of King Sunny Adé and his African Beats will perform April 18 right here in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in June, five Tuesday night concerts will continue this city’s grand tradition of Jazz in June, the 19^th year for this free series.

After that, who cares?

The Crescent City Jazzfest, now in its 41^st year, celebrates a range of musical styles far beyond jazz and those other ethnic sounds native to New Orleans—Cajun and zydeco music. The city also has a unique take on the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, r&b, soul and gospel music, and all are represented on stage. But even though its emphasis remains on the area’s considerable musical heritage, Jazzfest has grown in scope to include hugely popular artists of many traditions.

For example, this year’s festival features Simon and Garfunkel, B.B. King, The Allman Brothers, Pearl Jam, King Sunny Ade and His African Beats, Gipsy Kings, Widespread Panic, the Four Freshmen, the Levon Helm Band, Anita Baker, Keely Smith, The Black Crowes, Irma Thomas, Lionel Richie, George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Jose Feliciano, Richie Havens and Shawn Colvin.

Among the artists I hope to hear in my four-day visit are Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Jeff Beck, comedian Steve Martin doing his bluegrass thing, Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Dee Dee Bridgewater celebrating the music of Billie Holiday, Allen Toussaint, Elvis Costello, the Wayne Shorter Quartet, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the subdudes, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, and Astral Project.

The problem with planning your day at Jazzfest is that it requires maneuvering among 11 different stages simultaneously. Conflicts are inevitable, but that’s part of the fun, not to mention the great ethnic food, and the arts and crafts on display and for sale at the festival, which is located at the 145-acre county fairgrounds.

Festival hours are from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., so much of the morning and evening hours are free to explore the French Quarter, dine at one of the many fine restaurants, go on a riverboat cruise or take in some more live music at one of the city’s clubs, which are open to the wee hours.

While at the 12^th Annual Healdsburg Jazz Festival in early June, I hope to enjoy the music of pianist George Cables, bassist Charlie Haden with Ravi Coltrane and Geri Allen, bassist and singer Esperanza Spaulding, and pianist Jason Moran and the Bandwagon, featuring guitarist Bill Frisell. Making the experience even more significant is that I will share it with old friends, some of whom live near Healdsburg and others who will travel from San Diego.

The brainchild of founder and indefatigable director Jessica Felix, the Healdsburg event is a more mainstream jazz affair, true to its mission to present high-quality music that still challenges and intrigues the listener. Billed as “the best jazz festival north of San Francisco,” it brings world-class jazz to a non-urban environment where it is presented in a variety of imaginative venues, from wine-tasting rooms and open-air greens to cafes, hotel lobbies and historic theaters. The year’s festival runs June 4-13.

Expect a full report from New Orleans and Healdsburg—as well as reviews of local performances by King Sunny Ade and the Jazz in June concerts—in our July online news!

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New Acquisitions

"Jazz Icons" important addition to BMF library

Editor’s Note: At your request, we will mail a printed version of the newsletter. The online newsletter also is available at this website in PDF format for printing. Just click here: Newsletter