HubArts.com

Berklee's working out a groove

You don't have to put on the funkalicious shades like Berklee College of Music President (and drummer) Roger Brown did to greet honorary degree recipient  George Clinton the other day. It's easy to see with the naked eye that Berklee's impact has grown under Brown's tenure, which began in 2004.

The museums have been getting most of the ink lately when it comes to cultural impact around here, as the ICA makes itself felt in its new digs, the Museum of Fine Arts unveils its massive makeover, and the Gardner shows off its sleek addition. But despite its own changing profile and big expansion plans, Berklee hasn't gotten quite the same attention.

When I moved back to Mass. almost 15 years ago, the venerable music campus still had to remind us journos at times that it was a college now, not a school, even though that change had taken place back around 1970, when a relative of mine was taking classes there in big-band arranging. Jazz was still what people thought of when they thought of Berklee - the names most commonly mentioned were Pat Metheny and faculty member Gary Burton - as well as the Berklee Performance Center. Those in the neighborhood also knew it as the source of all those kids with instrument cases clogging the sidewalks around Tower Records.

The kids are still there, though Tower isn't. Berklee's student body seems to grow ever more talented and diverse, like this bluegrass fiddler from Prague. Now, though, folks like Clinton regularly pass through the campus, sometimes performing for the public, but almost always hanging and jamming with students. Students, alums and the occasional passing bigger name drop into the school's Cafe 939 to perform. Student and faculty ensembles pop up all over the city with (usually free) performances, especially in warmer weather and outdoors. And in September the Beantown Jazz Festival draws a hearteningly huge and diverse crowd to Columbus Ave as well as venues around the city. (Wish they'd called it something other than Beantown, but ....)

Berklee has long done well at the Grammys, but often with producer or songwriter credits that don't get much attention. Student-turned-faculty-member-turned-jazz-phenom Esperanza Spalding lives out of town now but did much to raise Berklee's image with that surprising 2011 Grammy win for best new artist. Spalding also appears on alum and percussion professor Terri Lyne Carrington's "The Mosaic Project," which followed her into the Grammy spotlight this year by winning best vocal jazz album.

Trey Parker of "South Park" and "Book of Mormon" fame and the brilliant singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi are also alums who were among Berklee's eight Grammy winners this year, as is songwriter Jeff Bhasker, who won best rap song for “All of the Lights” by Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie.

There are plenty of other signs that Berklee is hitting it right, but I'll name just one more: the Rethink Music conference, which Berklee runs with Reed Midem and Harvard's Berkman Center for Society and the Internet. Last year's event drew a full house of music business insiders to yak for two solid days about whatever the hell it is that's happened to the industry and where it goes next. There were endless podium and hallway debates about copyright and digital distribution and bands charting their own course in the increasingly chaotic field.

This year's event, featuring keynotes from the president of Pitchfork Media and the chief content officer for Spotify, is set for April 22-24 again at the Hynes Convention Center. I encourage Brown - no relation, by the way - to break out the shades, and maybe some nice stack heels too.

Photo of Clinton and Brown courtesy Berklee.

Jazz in Rockport, roots in Cambridge, love in the air

Two notable shows between now and Valentine's Day that you might have missed... Tickets are going fast for Danilo Perez and friends at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport on Friday night. This is a pretty smashing combination of the "Pan-American" jazz pianist and one of the most interesting performance spaces in the entire Boston area. This small, wood-and-glass performance hall offers great sound and a beautiful harbor view. Now, sure, it will be dark when the show begins at 8 p.m., but Perez will cast plenty of illumination anyway. Tix are $25-$35 and if you're interested, I'd call 978-546-7391 or go here right now. Bonus: The show is a benefit for the North Shore Jazz Project, whose All-Star band will open. Not a bad date night.

The other show is more directly Valentine-related. Three real-life couples, rootsy-folkie types all, will play Songs of Love at Passim in Harvard Square, Cambridge, on Valentine's Day, aka Tuesday. Darol Anger and Emy Phelps, Lissa Schneckenberger and Corey DiMario, and Brittany Haas and Kai Welch will present what they're calling Sweethearts’ Night Out, with originals and covers looking at romance from, well, both sides now and then some. All three pairs are couples in real life; Schenkenburger and  Dimario are married. The 8 p.m. show is $23 for Passim members and $25 for non-members.  They can be purchased in advance here or at 617-492-7679.

Not watching the Super Bowl? Passim offers an alternative

Very alternative. While the rest of us will be tuning in for the Patriots-Giants rematch, the Harvard Square folk landmark will feature Grammy-nominated producer/performer Nicolay and "exploratory jazz" trio The Hot at Nights performing the music from their recent "Shibuya Session" EP, which you can hear here. Nicolay is an electronica producer best known as half of The Foreign Exchange with rapper Phonte. North Carolina's The Hot at Nights feature 8-string guitar virtuoso Chris Boerner, with Matt Douglas on sax/woodwinds and Nick Baglio on drums. The EP features new versions of tracks from Nicolay's 2009 album "City Lights Vol. 2: Shibuya." It's pretty mellow, decidedly unlike Vince Wilfork slamming Eli Manning to the ground.The gig is scheduled for 8:00 pm, by which time I hope Wilfork will have done that at least twice, at Club Passim, 47 Palmer Street, Cambridge. Tix: $13 for Passim members, and $15 for non-members, at: www.passim.org or (617) 492-7679.

Eddie Coyle at the end

Only one show left, Sunday at 7:30pm, for "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" at Oberon. I've written about the theatrical adaptation of this Boston crime classic by Bill Doncaster a few times over the past year, including attending its first reading more than a year ago in the back room of the Burren. Thursday night I finally got to see the full version at Oberon - I brought my dad, who took me to the movie back in 1972, and we scarfed beers and burgers over at Charlie's  Kitchen first to get in the old-school mood.

The play was everything I expected, with its network of conspiratorial conversations staged all around Oberon and sometimes overlapping as the web of circumstance tightens around the characters. I don't review plays I write about, but this was dark fun. Special nod to Rick Park as the bartender/ex-con Dillon, whose seemingly genial, reasonable exterior is gradually revealed as a disguise. Peter Darrigo is also effectively real as a familiar kind of cranky, self-aggrandizing, working-class Masshole; it's just that Jimmy Scalise's gig involves guns and banks instead of power tools or paint brushes.

I'm still debating the depiction of Coyle himself by Doncaster, director Maria Silvaggi and actor Paulo Branco. Mind you, they deliver on their artistic intent - I'm just not sure I share their interpretation 100%. Sure, the movie's performance by Robert Mitchum gave the character more gravitas than author George V. Higgins may have intended, but the Coyle they give us in the play is a total mook.

Overall, this is a compelling restaging of the tale, and last I heard, there were only a couple of handfuls of tickets left for the final performance, at 866-811-4111 or cluboberon.com.

Work and play at MASSMoCA. And a boat.

Made one of my regular visits to MASSMoCA in North Adams last weekend and found that the current exhibits - at least the ones I could hit in a couple of hours - are as usual a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. At the sublime end of the spectrum of course is Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, which has its own building and its own web site and is expected to stick around through 2033. I've been through it perhaps half a dozen times since it opened in 2008, and the work still feels like genius.

The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility, on display through April 14, does something different for a MoCA show, tackling its subject head-on, almost polemically at times. The idea is to show how far labor has fallen from the days of Rosie the Riveter in our era of economic despair, outsourcing, migrancy and exploitation. A series of photos shows workers increasingly buried on a beach, in sight of distant factories, until there's nothing left of them. A nearby installation combines a workers' break room and a gallows, like a New Yorker cartoon that needs no caption.

Most compelling is Adrian Paci's tragicomic "Centro di permanenza temporanea," a large-screen video that shows solemn-faced  minority workers lining up to climb one of those wheeled airport staircases - but instead of boarding a plane, they are left standing stoically on the staircase in the middle of the airport, while the shiny jets of commerce taxi and take off all around them. (Image courtesy MASSMoCA.) The video is specifically intended to comment on the plight of undocumented workers, but the sense of abandonment seems to apply to pretty much everyone these days. This five-minute film was a kick in the head.

Upstairs in Building 4 is the exhibit Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum, running through February. This is one of those shows where the scale of the works is designed to take advantage of the huge spaces at MASSMoCA, so that they make an impact even if the curatorial explanations don't always convince. The centerpiece of Ward's show is "Nu Colossus," which features a fishing boat cut in sections and a giant, conical basket-woven fish trap of a kind used in Ward's native Jamaica. One's immediate impression is that the hunter has become the hunted. But of course such obvious interpretation is never correct here at MoCA, and the accompanying text informs us, "This duality of seduction and entrapment is key to Ward's idea of mirage, which as an image both distorts reality and points to a sense of need."

I sometimes feel as though I am insulting the artist when I talk about what's most affecting in these giant installations, as it's often different than the stated intent of the work. Does my sense of wonder at their immediate visceral impact trump the Moebius-strip curator-speak of the cerebral explanations? Disbelieving some of the airy conceptual constructions does not make one a Philistine, does it?

By itself, bringing a boat into the gallery no longer floats mine. But a look into the gaping maw of the fish trap - filled with broken furniture (more on that in a sec) and lit in sinister chiarscuro by the gaps in the basket weave - was a stunner. All I could see was an upsettingly intense still-life of a tornado's unholy inner chaos, looking up into the funnel as it sucked away me, Dorothy and Toto. My crappy cellphone pic can't do it justice, but perhaps it doesn't matter, as this interpretation is apparently an unintended consequence of the artist's craft and vision, and nowhere mentioned in the text. Thanks to eavesdropping, though, I know I'm not the only one who saw it immediately.

The furniture, as well as the foam rubber, resistors and capacitors making up Ward's giant "Mango Tourists" in an adjacent gallery, were sourced around the museum, which occupies the former Sprague Electric factory complex. A large installation in the Workers exhibit re-creates and comments on an "artwork" of disposable cups stuck in a chain link fence at the Sprague plant during a 1970 strike. To use a couple of verbs much favored by curators nowadays, it would be interesting to "unpack" the ways that these works "interrogate" the site's history. There are places in the museum where the workers' passages (in both senses of the word) remain vividly present.

Finally I wandered into the football-field sized Building 5 gallery, the site of MASSMoCA's most mind-blowing triumphs and its most hilarious misfires. The sheer size of the joint brings out artistic ambitions that raise the stakes so high even the misfires are must-sees. That, alas, was not the case with Katharina Grosse's one floor up more highly, an exhibit which ended, fortunately or unfortunately, on New Year's Day.

The main portion of the exhibit consists of truckloads of dirt heaped on the gallery floor, spray-painted in various colors and stuck with large, styrofoam rods that look like the icy wastes of Superman's home planet. It called to mind the el cheapo alien landscapes on the original "Star Trek." The exhibit text says that Grosse's work "opens up a new path for painting while rearranging conventions, hierarchy and our very habits of seeing." Also: "the anarchic work embraces a state of ambiguity that allows for alternative ways of processing what is seen." To which I can only say, uh huh.

MASSMoCA: You can get there from here

NORTH ADAMS -  MASSMoCA, the Clark Art Institute and other cultural attractions in the North Adams-Williamstown area are once again accessible to eastern Mass. residents without a long Mass Pike re-route or a detour through dueling banjos country in the Berkshires.

On Dec. 15 the state reopened the stretch of Route 2 that runs through Charlemont, Savoy, Florida and North Adams after $23 million in rapid-fire repairs. The road, a key-east west link in that corner of the state, was washed out in Tropical Storm Irene in late August.

Take it from someone with family in North Adams and an interest in MASSMoCA, the Clark, the Williams College art museum and various other attractions: doing without Route 2 would have made a winter trip here less than appealing. The state-recommended detour added considerably to the travel time. In November we took a shorter route recommended by MASSMoCA, which traversed some beautiful valleys and slopes in the backwoods north of Route 2, but also brought us to a near head-on with a convoy of giant dump trucks carrying fill for the Route 2 project, on a narrow two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. There were Trucks use lower gears signs and hair-raising descents.

I spent a night out on Interstate 93 during the Fast 14 bridge-replacement project for a story, and was flabbergasted by what they could do in the course of a week. I'm even more impressed by the Route 2 project, which we drove this week. We'd heard a bridge was out and some other areas might have seen a little washout, but in fact it looks like several hundreds yards of roadway have been replaced (in different stretches), in one of the most hilly and remote high-traffic stretches in the state, through steep hills, with precipitous dropoffs to the Cold River on the other side. Banks and long cement retaining walls are or will be rebuilt, entire stretches of river seem to have new channels, landslides have been cleared away, etc. We got our $23 million worth, although it looks like the project will continue through the winter.

It's safe to go back to MoCA, in other words, and now through Sunday is your last chance to see Katharina Grosse's "One Floor Up More Highly" (right) in the museum's ginormous Gallery 5. Strangely, it bears a certain resemblance to the piles of fill at the Route 2 constuction sites. A museum official said today that they didn't think the road closure had affected visitor traffic much, but that they've noticed more people coming through since Route 2 reopened on Dec. 15, so maybe it hurt a little bit after all.

One other note. If any of you are fond of stopping in the Mohawk Trail State Forest during the warm weather months to use the unofficial nude beach just downstream from the state campground, I have bad news. The trees that shielded the site from the road are gone.

Coldplay returns to Boston. It's like they never left.

Coldplay returns to Boston next July 29 for a gig at the TD Garden. It's part of a North American tour announced today and kicking off in Edmonton in April, in support of their debuted-at-No.-1 "Mylo Xyloto" album. Yes, they're coming back, but you're forgiven if you haven't exactly been missing them.

Adele and Lady Gaga can try, but no one has matched the ubiquity of Coldplay's music in this century. Briefly an underdog critical favorite, they're now everyband for the masses, sonic wallpaper lining our Starbucks world. I was at a church Christmas fair the other day, browsing a friend's photographs, and when some girl sat down at the piano in the corner to amuse herself, it was "Clocks" she picked out on the 88s. Of course. I just googled "I hate Coldplay" and got 23,000,000 results. That sort of backlash is inevitable these days of course. But who can really hear anything new that Coldplay does now, what with "Clocks" and "The Scientist" and "Yellow" and ten more soundalike hits rattling around in our brains - no, wait, it's not an ear worm, that girl's actually playing it. They're the band so popular that nobody listens to them anymore. Kind of a melancholy place to be, when you think about it.

But that doesn't mean the show won't sell out. An American Express cardholder presale for tix begins Monday at 10 am; sales to the general public begin Dec. 17 at 10 am.  Tickets are available at 1-800-745-3000, Ticketmaster.com and LiveNation.com. The band will also be seen on "Austin City Limits" on PBS on New Year's Eve.

"Under the Influence" of Boston studio

In Boston and later Cambridge in the 1980s and '90s, Fort Apache Studios recorded some of the biggest names in "alternative" music, including the Pixies, Radiohead, Weezer and Yo la Tengo, along with local faves gone national on the Pixies' trail, such as Juliana Hatfield, Buffalo Tom, Dinosaur Jr. and the Lemonheads.

Now Fort Apache co-founder Paul Kolderie, who turned the knobs on many of those recordings, has put some of the old mics and amps and other gear to work on behalf of Berklee students performing in tribute to those influences.

The "Under the Influence" album Berklee's student-run label Heavy Rotation Records has Berklee up-and-comers recording a pair of covers by big-time '80s and '90s bands and the acts that influenced them: Julia Easterlin (Pixies, Radiohead), Da'Rayia (Gang of Four, Red Hot Chili Peppers), David Pramik featuring Johnny Duke (Joy Division, U2), the Boston Boys featuring Emily Elbert (Hüsker Dü, Green Day), the Berklee String Metal Ensemble (My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins), and Pinn Panelle (Mission of Burma, REM). Previous releases on Heavy Rotation tend to feature previously recorded tracks submitted by the performers; this time Kolderie plugged in his equipment and recorded the artists himself. You can sample the tracks here: 

This Saturday at at the Berklee Performance Center, Heavy Rotation will host an album-release concert with the student performers plus a ringer, a solo - but electric - set by Roger Miller of Mission of Burma. Tix are $8 in advance ($12 day of show) at berkleebpc.com and at the box office. Call 617-747-2261 for more information.

WELDER is iPad crack for word nerds

Actually it's W.E.L.D.E.R., if you want to get technical about it, which stands for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. It's an iPhone and iPad game debuted this month by Ayopa Games and Highline Games, a startup from some of the Rockstar NYC people. And it has been the largest single time-suck in my life for about three weeks now. Gameplay combines elements of Scrabble, Tetris and an old-school Jumble. And the touch-screen interface is so well-designed that it's just about impossible to put down. All the uncool kids are doing it.

When you start playing, you face a 64-tile board, much like Scrabble, only it's filled with random letters and a few blank tiles. Tap one letter, then another, and they swap places. The idea is to move them around to make a four-letter or longer word, generally using as few swaps as possible. Double-tap a blank tile and a virtual keyboard appears so you can chose a letter to fill it.

In the first round, it's only adjacent tiles that you can swap, but in subsequent rounds more complicated parlays are available. Each word you make disappears from the board, and random letters slide down to fill in, sometimes forming words on their own, like a Webster's pachinko machine.

Each round you get only so many swaps to make so many words, and the more creative you are in your choices, using rarer letters, the higher you score. More scoring buys you more swaps...

Non-word people are glazing over about now. But what's really addicting about this game - what's making it spread like wildfire, at least among my Bay State tribe - is the interface. The skin is a subtle mid-century Cold War modern, with peeling paint and big red and green buttons, like a word game in a missile silo. Here and there are touches of steampunk, like the brass-framed ticker scoring your words across the bottom of the game board. (Tap a word there, and you get a definition.)

And the sound design features two tracks. While you're thinking, there's an ominous ambient hiss and flutter, like the sound of slow decay in that missile silo or on early first-person shooter games. Feedback arrives as a clanging, dinging clamor when you make a word, reminiscent of the doors and gates sliding down on the opening credits of "Get Smart" or "MST3K." Over all the sense is of being a cog in a machine, combined with a meaningless Pavlovian payout each time you score. Why this is so appealing, I can't say. The sounds also annoy the crap out of anyone in the room with you, which may or may not be desirable.

The game's only real flaw is the dictionary, which misses some obvious words and includes others, while mostly  skipping swears that would really come in handy sometimes. But they're taking dictionary suggestions at words@weldergame.com.

Last I looked, WELDER was $1.99 on the App Store, but it's sometimes discounted to 99 cents. My phone is an Android so I can't say how it would play on that smaller screen, but on iPad it's an addictive joy. I'm stuck on Level 8 at the moment, and my wife greeted the news that I'd scored 670 for PURRS thanks to bonus tiles with the same kind of cheerful but not actually excited "awesome" that she gives when I call her in to see a sports highlight on the news. But by then I was already on to the next word...

 

Kingsley Flood drops new EP

Kingsley Flood's "Dust Windows" was my favorite album of 2010 and stayed atop my charts until the Decemberists dropped "The King Is Dead." Now the Boston band is about to drop a new six-song EP, "Colder Still," that knocks the Decemberists' leftovers EP "Long Live The King" out of my personal Number 1 spot. Funny.

"Colder Still" is an interim step for Kingsley Flood, a bit of a stylistic grabbag. "I Don't Wanna Go Home" (not the Southside Johnny tune) has some power-poppy, almost glam touches behind a typically headlong vocal from frontman/songwriter Naseem Khuri. "Wonderland" opens with a single guitar picked behind a close-up, unadorned Khuri confessional ("Brother I've been lying all along/my collar's not as clean as I let on...") before Jenée Morgan's fiddle comes in and the tune begins to canter. "Mannequin Man" is a speedy guitar rager that evokes early Elvis Costello or Graham Parker and is gonna leave 'em drained when played live. Title track "Colder Still" is spooky and November-y as you can get, with Khuri's long, torchy syllables against spikey electric guitar on the chorus.

The EP has gobs of everything I loved about Kinglsey Flood in the first place, from Khuri's tumbling, Dylanesque lyrics to the collaborative unity of the band's playing and the surprising little fills and accents on every song. There's a reason the band got featured on NPR and won New Artist of the Year at the 2010 Boston Music Awards and Best Roots Act in the 2010 and 2011 Boston Phoenix Best Music Poll. (That was Khuri yowling about "the pulse of the nation" on those WBZ ads, too, another KF song placement.)

That said, "Dust Windows" was recorded as a piece in a rural Vermont retreat, which added subtly but immeasurably to its greatness, the way it held together. "Colder Still" shows it was recorded in Somerville and Brooklyn studios and I suspect at different times. Still, it will tide me over until the band's next full-length album, which I'm told is all of a piece and written but not yet recorded. Can hardly wait.

Kingsley Flood will release "Colder Still" with a three-night run at Lizard Lounge, in Cambridge, December 8, 9, and 10. Support acts include Balthrop, Alabama (NYC) and Son of the Sun (Buffalo) on Dec. 8; Swear and Shake (NYC) and Paper Thick Walls (Chicago) on Dec. 9; and Jamie Kent and the Options (Northampton) and This Way (Portland) on Dec. 10. Shows are 21+, doors at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 advance, $12 at the door; order online at Brown Paper Tickets. Copies of "Colder Still" will be available at the shows, though the EP's official release date is January 10, 2012.