Last week I was fortunate to enjoy the greatest concentration of quality live performances in my life. Saturday, through a well-connected friend, I was able to attend “Nixon in China” at the Kauffman Center. It was my first time in the building and I was really impressed. The hall was beautiful and the sound was fantastic. I’ve heard people complain about the use of microphones during the opera but it didn’t bother me. Seems like a silly thing to nitpick. I loved the score and the first act was easily the most enjoyable hour and a half of opera I’ve ever experienced. Things seemed to be somewhat historically accurate until the second act when a woman shot Henry Kissinger and things turned symbolic and arty. I continued to enjoy the music and the fantastic female soloists even if I stopped trying to understand what was happening. It was also fun to see audience members get uncomfortable when the word “motherfucker” was used in the third act.
The tickets for this show were over $100 and I would not have gotten to go if it had not been for special circumstances. It’s easy to lament the price of tickets and even make facile claims about elitism and class. Having seen the show, it’s obvious that they lost quite a bit of money even if they sold out every night at that price. Operas are not cheap to produce. To have that many musicians of that caliber it must have cost over $10k for each rehearsal. The production was obviously very expensive. You can’t put on work of that scope and quality and charge $25 a seat. The numbers don’t even work at $125 a seat. Please spare me your “one percent” bullshit when it comes to the opera.
On Sunday I saw Radiohead at the Sprint Center. I’ve wanted to see this band for many years so this show was a “big deal” for me. Going to a big rock show is a welcome palette cleanser. I couldn’t get over how good the sound was in such a large venue. Perhaps it had something to do with it not being stupid loud so you can actually hear everything instead of a deafening roar.
Halfway through the show I couldn’t help but feel like I had waited 5 years too late to see them. I enjoy their newer work but it’s not the soundtrack to my teenage years like their earlier work is. The band is in a position that they don’t need to play their greatest hits to sell out arenas and was content to play a lot of their more obscure work. I was starting to get worried that I would leave the show disappointed when they started to play just enough of my favorite tunes. I told my friend at the show that I wouldn’t complain as long as I got to hear “Ideotique” and I did. So I won’t.
On Wednesday I saw the SFJazz Collective in Lawrence. I love this organization and always make a point to see them whenever they come through town. I’ll admit that this is not my favorite line up of the band. Nor is it my favorite season of repertoire but I did enjoy this performance quite a bit. It was my first time to see Mark Turner and Antonio Hart, both of whom have their pictures up in my practice studio, and they were as wonderful live as I had hoped. The entire band lived up to their individual reputations in a big way. Unfortunately I don’t think they were playing strong arrangements. Stevie Wonder is a genius and his music speaks for itself but for me it didn’t translate well for a mid-sized jazz ensemble. I couldn’t help but feel that the show was yet another example of the all too common phenomenon in jazz of some of the best musicians in the world playing over not-so-good music. That being said, it was worth the price in admission to hear Antonio Hart’s second solo.
Since I was seated in the front row, I was free to examine the performance habits of some of my heroes on a very intimate level. I was struck by how world class players deal with the same issue that we all do: What do you do when you’re not playing? Once a solo starts they awkwardly walk to the side of the stage just like the rest of us. The idea is that you get out of the way of the audience’s view of the soloist. Unfortunately it’s always distracting to walk across the stage. Once you’re safely out of the way, you have a few different behavioral options. You can fiddle with your instrument, bob your head, stand there with an expressionless stoicism, or chat with your bandmates. It’s an imperfect practice that works best in clubs, but on a concert stage its deficiencies become glaringly obvious . Perhaps the only solution is for everyone to play all of the time? I don’t know what the solution is but I will say that during the course of a performance you start to pick favorites and I found myself drawn to the musicians that seemed to be enjoying themselves. Just saying.
In looking back on the three performances, the biggest thing I take away is in the different way the audience related to each. The audience was delighted by the opera and they admired SFJazz. But they loved Radiohead.
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