Archive for the ‘ Music ’ Category

David Zambrano of "Soul Project." (Photo: Anja Hitzenberger)

David Zambrano is the creator, choreographer, and ringmaster of “Soul Project,” which returns to Swarthmore College from the Fringe Festival. (Photo: Anja Hitzenberger)

Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Posted: Thursday, September 24, 2015, 3:01 AM

Soul Project, a European hit since 2006, tours extensively, performing for intimate crowds that mill around its international crew of dancers as they solo to American soul and R&B songs. Swarthmore College helped bring it here as one of Fringe Festival’s final shows, where the two-night run sold out at Christ Church last weekend. It reprises on Swarthmore’s Lang stage Friday and Saturday.

Its creator, teacher, and choreographer, David Zambrano, is a Venezuelan who divides his time between Amsterdam and Brussels. He is something of a magical-realist Pied Piper – or a ringmaster.

A topknot sits where the ringmaster’s top hat would be, if designer Mat Voorter had provided one – and the barefoot Zambrano is dressed only in wide red-and-white striped tails. And though he had no whip in hand, the audience meekly obeyed his invitation to enter from the cobblestone street outside. Lace-gloved Edivaldo Ernesto shouted, “Be careful!” and danced as we proceeded to the now-seatless fourth-floor space.

Each dancer found a spotlight, getting cues from an iPod Shuffle. That inflected a nice touch of chance for audience and performers, uncertainty causing everyone to shuffle around before finding where to be or look.

Slovak Peter Jasko, in sequined eyelids and Elvis jumpsuit, often danced low velocity, almost in place. In polka dots and hula skirt, the only woman, Slovenian Nina Fajdiga, blunted her most violent movements with catlike disdain. For us?

With a half-shaved head, South Korean Young Cool Park offered the most original, overtly political move of the night, goose-stepping out of his spot. Zambrano began with an energetic Pogo-dance in what I hope was a waggish wink at overwrought Jennifer Holliday singing, “And I Am Telling You, I’m Not Going.”

Curiously, he chose mostly American soul songs of the ’60s and ’70s, concert recordings – to Philly ears, tired-sounding – rather than their dancier versions. Philly invented many social dances in that era – the Mashed Potato, Watusi, and, of course, the Twist, all of which morphed with dances from other cities into funkier club and house styles by the ’80s. Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 anthem, “I Will Survive,” had an urgent rhythm we all danced to; here, the more saccharine 1982 version by Gladys Knight didn’t get our dance cells grooving.

Instead, this cast of seven found Euro-grooves, isolating body parts in wildly opposing directions, flexing whatever they could simultaneously, hands almost flung off the wrists like the opera gloves in a burlesque show. These moves were like choreographic selfies – contact-improv for the soloist.

DANCE REVIEW

Soul Project

8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Lang Performing Arts Center at Swarthmore College.

Admission: Free.

Information: 610-328-8200 or www.swarthmore.edu

Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/20150924_Review___Soul_Project__leaps_from_Fringe_to_Swarthmore.html#U4Mj737WPEjVK0W7.99

Slam dunks from Philadanco

Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Posted: Saturday, April 19, 2014, 1:08 AM

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Adryan Moorefield and Janine Beckles of Philadanco.

The program included a mix of newer and older pieces.
To a packed house, Philadanco brought back Donald Byrd’s 1995 BAMM at its spring offering at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater Thursday night. I first saw it in 2004 with the now-retired force of nature Odara Jabali-Nash as the center of its centrifugal force. This time, six dancers revolve around veteran company dancer Roxanne Lyst like numbers on a spinning clock.

The missing hands of this no-tick-tock clock are Mio Morales’ quick-pulsed percussive score, which ultimately hurls the dancers from the circle and into various patterns around the stage. The men walked off and on stage ramrod-stiff, almost militaristic. But the spitfire Lyst remains in control, leading the others through Africanized, hunched-over skipping. Their fists pumped to the floor, pushing their shoulders up in synchronized rhythms.

It was such a sweet surprise when many of the same dancers came out next in Gene Hill Sagan’s ballet Suite en Bleu, to the music of Handel and Bach, which, with its metronomic formalisms, mirrored Morales’ score. Lyst, Rosita Adamo, and Janine Beckles, in soft hyacinth-blue gowns and ballet slippers, flared out their skirts in their tours, Tommie-Waheed Evans, Dwayne Cook Jr., and even the towering Adryan Moorefield lifting them joyfully as if they were flowers.

The company premiere of Ulysses Dove’s 1984 Bad Blood, to Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel” and “Walking and Falling” and Peter Gabriel’s “Excellent Birds,” seemed a little off-kilter on opening night. This normally sure-footed company did not yet have the piece in its belly, where they need it. It is a furiously brutal work about the search for connection through physical impact. I could see Beckles cross herself before running out from the wings to throw her spread-eagled legs around one of the men who had to take her impact without faltering. I have no doubt they will ultimately devour the piece with their typical fierceness.

That hunched-over Africanist skip returned in Rennie Harris’ 2007 Philadelphia Experiment, only this time as a ghost of itself, haunting us from the centuries of slavery where even the muscle memory diminishes. Evans ferociously spurred the full company through its paces past Philly’s darker moments – shown in a video collage by John Abner – to embrace the joy and fulfillment that hip-hop and dance bring to many of us in Harris’ paean to our city. With so many slam dunks throughout the show, I wanted to jump up and shout: BOOMSHAKALAKA!

 

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20140419_Review__Slam_dunks_from_Philadanco.html#Oiq2X5KEM4BcfTPQ.99

Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Posted: Saturday, June 15, 2013, 3:01 AM

ALEXANDER IZILIAEV

Pennsylvania Ballet dancers in company premiere of William Forsythe’s “Artifact Suite.”

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The Pennsylvania Ballet closes its 2013 spring season with an artistically varied program that is emotionally and intellectually satisfying. At the Academy of Music on Thursday night, the curtain rose on 12 dancers, backs to the audience, walking forward, taking steps back, making half-turns, adding more dance moves until they broke rank. The women in long-sleeved gowns, the men in blouses and straight trousers (by John Macfarlane, who also designed the moody set based on a Munch painting) were dancing Jirí Kylián’s 1981 Forgotten Land.

In this company premiere, Gabriella Yudenich and partner James Ihde were passionately dramatic in black, while Lillian Di Piazza and Lorin Mathis were exquisitely romantic in white. Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem gave the work gravitas, but the women’s hunched backs and crooked arms with fingers seeming to drip from their hands gave it a macabre, Munch-ian look.

The ballet’s resident choreographer, Matthew Neenan, set his poetic At Various Points to Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words. A world premiere, this quartet is his 14th commission for the company. There is always something ludic about Neenan’s work. Here, it’s finger-wagging, putting the finger on the nose or chin, or pointing straight at the audience as if to say, “We see you seeing us.”

I wish I could have seen Rebecca Kanach’s raggedy costumes better, but lighting designer John Hoey shaded them too darkly and the particolored spotlights didn’t reach the dancers. If they had too little light, Martha Koeneman’s piano playing in the pit sparked them through the lighter parts of the score.

With the company and East Coast premiere of William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite, the Ballet adds to the two Forsythes in its repertoire. Condensed from his full evening-length 1984 ballet (the first he made for the Frankfurt Ballet when he became its director) and staged by choreographer Jodie Gates to the chaconne from Bach’s Solo Violin Partita No. 2, it looked very masculine: muscular, combative, cerebral, philosophical, and breathtakingly unsentimental.

The firewall falls repeatedly with unapologetic thuds to rise again on the 38 dancers now regrouped. Barefooted Caralin Curcio is “The Other,” who conducted arm signals throughout, echoing the mass motion in sync with Eurythmics exercises and Laban movement choirs. She was commanding, but sometimes got lost in the overly crowded field.

When these forces walked off in soft goose step at the end of the first half, it looked very like Forsythe was referencing Germany’s past while ushering in its artistic future. The pointe-slippered women performed a torrent of tendus to the late Eva Crossman-Hecht’s pianisms in the second half, as if in ballet barre class. Later, “The Other” leads the men, ribboning them through the women in this blitzkrieg of pure classicism sans embellishment.

The Pennsylvania Ballet closes its 2013 spring season with an artistically varied program that is emotionally and intellectually satisfying. At the Academy of Music on Thursday night, the curtain rose on 12 dancers, backs to the audience, walking forward, taking steps back, making half-turns, adding more dance moves until they broke rank. The women in long-sleeved gowns, the men in blouses and straight trousers (by John Macfarlane, who also designed the moody set based on a Munch painting) were dancing Jirí Kylián’s 1981 Forgotten Land. In this company premiere, Gabriella Yudenich and partner James Ihde were passionately dramatic in black, while Lillian Di Piazza and Lorin Mathis were exquisitely romantic in white. Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem gave the work gravitas, but the women’s hunched backs and crooked arms with fingers seeming to drip from their hands gave it a macabre, Munch-ian look. The ballet’s resident choreographer, Matthew Neenan, set his poetic At Various Points to Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words. A world premiere, this quartet is his 14th commission for the company. There is always something ludic about Neenan’s work. Here, it’s finger-wagging, putting the finger on the nose or chin, or pointing straight at the audience as if to say, “We see you seeing us.” I wish I could have seen Rebecca Kanach’s raggedy costumes better, but designer John Hoey shaded them too darkly and the particolored spotlights didn’t reach the dancers. If they had too little light, Martha Koeneman’s piano playing in the pit sparked them through the lighter parts of the score. With the company and East Coast premiere of William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite, the Ballet adds to the two Forsythes in its repertoire. Condensed from his full evening-length 1984 ballet (the first he made for the Frankfurt Ballet when he became its director) and staged by choreographer Jodie Gates to the chaconne from Bach’s Solo Violin Partita No. 2, it looked very masculine: muscular, combative, cerebral, philosophical, and breathtakingly unsentimental. The firewall falls repeatedly with unapologetic thuds to rise again on the 38 dancers now regrouped. Barefooted Caralin Curcio is “The Other,” who conducted arm signals throughout, echoing the mass motion in sync with Eurythmics exercises and Laban movement choirs. She was commanding, but sometimes got lost in the overly crowded field. When these forces walked off in soft goose step at the end of the first half, it looked very like Forsythe was referencing Germany’s past while ushering in its artistic future. The pointe-slippered women performed a torrent of tendus to the late Eva Crossman-Hecht’s pianisms in the second half, as if in ballet barre class. Later, “The Other” leads the men, ribboning them through the women in this blitzkrieg of pure classicism sans embellishment.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20130615_Pennsylvania_Ballet_in_a_satisfying_spring_finale.html#oDpAS18wjckMS2D7.99
The Pennsylvania Ballet closes its 2013 spring season with an artistically varied program that is emotionally and intellectually satisfying. At the Academy of Music on Thursday night, the curtain rose on 12 dancers, backs to the audience, walking forward, taking steps back, making half-turns, adding more dance moves until they broke rank. The women in long-sleeved gowns, the men in blouses and straight trousers (by John Macfarlane, who also designed the moody set based on a Munch painting) were dancing Jirí Kylián’s 1981 Forgotten Land. In this company premiere, Gabriella Yudenich and partner James Ihde were passionately dramatic in black, while Lillian Di Piazza and Lorin Mathis were exquisitely romantic in white. Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem gave the work gravitas, but the women’s hunched backs and crooked arms with fingers seeming to drip from their hands gave it a macabre, Munch-ian look. The ballet’s resident choreographer, Matthew Neenan, set his poetic At Various Points to Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words. A world premiere, this quartet is his 14th commission for the company. There is always something ludic about Neenan’s work. Here, it’s finger-wagging, putting the finger on the nose or chin, or pointing straight at the audience as if to say, “We see you seeing us.” I wish I could have seen Rebecca Kanach’s raggedy costumes better, but designer John Hoey shaded them too darkly and the particolored spotlights didn’t reach the dancers. If they had too little light, Martha Koeneman’s piano playing in the pit sparked them through the lighter parts of the score. With the company and East Coast premiere of William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite, the Ballet adds to the two Forsythes in its repertoire. Condensed from his full evening-length 1984 ballet (the first he made for the Frankfurt Ballet when he became its director) and staged by choreographer Jodie Gates to the chaconne from Bach’s Solo Violin Partita No. 2, it looked very masculine: muscular, combative, cerebral, philosophical, and breathtakingly unsentimental. The firewall falls repeatedly with unapologetic thuds to rise again on the 38 dancers now regrouped. Barefooted Caralin Curcio is “The Other,” who conducted arm signals throughout, echoing the mass motion in sync with Eurythmics exercises and Laban movement choirs. She was commanding, but sometimes got lost in the overly crowded field. When these forces walked off in soft goose step at the end of the first half, it looked very like Forsythe was referencing Germany’s past while ushering in its artistic future. The pointe-slippered women performed a torrent of tendus to the late Eva Crossman-Hecht’s pianisms in the second half, as if in ballet barre class. Later, “The Other” leads the men, ribboning them through the women in this blitzkrieg of pure classicism sans embellishment.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20130615_Pennsylvania_Ballet_in_a_satisfying_spring_finale.html#oDpAS18wjckMS2D7.99
Travel Deals $999 — Punta Cana: 4-Star ‘Dreams’ Weeklong Trip from Philly * See all travel deals » Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer Posted: Saturday, June 15, 2013, 3:01 AM
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20130615_Pennsylvania_Ballet_in_a_satisfying_spring_finale.html#oDpAS18wjckMS2D7.99

This morning I lost one of my dearest friends and most important musical role models, and the world lost one of its best composers. Bill Duckworth was diagnosed with pancreas cancer a year ago last February. He got into a state-of-the-art therapy program, and had the disease in remission, and for quite a few months it looked like he was going to beat one of the fastest and most lethal cancers there is (and the same one that killed Morton Feldman). But he finally started having bad reactions to the chemo, and it wore him down. I had heard about a week ago that he had decided to go off chemo, and he went fast after that, slipping away about midnight last night, according to his wife Nora, who called this morning.

to read more: http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2012/09/strange-times-william-duckworth-1943-2012.html#respond

Posted: Fri, May. 4, 2012, 9:37 PM
By Merilyn Jackson
FOR THE INQUIRER

In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the boy was dressed in leaves, as perhaps was Pan, the Greek god of nature whom Barrie had in mind. When Pennsylvania Ballet gave the ballet Peter Pan its Philadelphia premiere Thursday night at the Academy of Music with Alexander Peters as the boy from Neverland, his sprightly body was not clad in leaves, but scantily enough in shorts and straps around his chest to suggest a ruffian from the wilds.

The Oregon Ballet originally commissioned choreographer Trey McIntyre to create this Peter Pan, his first full-length ballet, but funding problems caused him to set the work on the Houston Ballet in 2002. Though he came to Philadelphia to polish his gem on this company, there were still some rough edges opening night.

The flying sequences, in which Wendy (Evelyn Kocak), John (Jonathan Stiles), and Michael (Abigail Mentzer) take off with Peter, had to be rehearsed in another theater until two days before the first performance. Pan was also the god of theater criticism, so I think he might have forgiven the slight scenery malfunctions and occasional missteps when dancers could not always find their places.

As delightful as he was aerially, the young Alexander Peters was not up to par partnering a taller Kocak. In one horizontal slide, he thudded rather than slid her; later, Kocak, with Zachary Hench as Hook, performed the slide perfectly.

With her striking, sophisticated looks, Amy Aldridge — who rose from apprentice in 1994 to principal in 2001 and is a senior company member — struck me as poor casting for Tinkerbell. However, she appeared only once, briefly, and then was represented by a flickering light. (McIntyre did not include one of the most endearing sections for young audiences — for many their first audience-participation experience — when Tink is poisoned and they have to clap her back to life.)

The great story ballets — Firebird, Spartacus, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet — link generations across time with upswept melodic themes that weave throughout, signaling plot changes. The humorless hodgepodge score of Sir Edward Elgar’s music, arranged by Niel DePonte, was the slightest, most unmagical element of the ballet.

Nevertheless, there was plenty of magic inside the gorgeous “Grand Old Lady of Locust Street” Thursday night. Hench as Hook was commanding, the huge crocodile grouchily hungry. And wonderful group dances among the Shadows, Redskins, Pirates, Lost Boys, and Mermaids — where soon-to-retire Arantxa Ochoa does a comic turn — save this darkly imagined Peter Pan. You’ll live forever in our hearts, Peter.

Posted: Sun, Apr. 29, 2012, 10:21 PM
By Merilyn Jackson
FOR THE INQUIRER

The  fidget space is on North Mascher Street just above Cecil B. Moore Avenue, in a little niche of the arts neighborhood around the corner from Mascher Space and between Crane Arts on American Street and Pig Iron’s school on North Second Street.

Dancer/choreographer Megan Bridge and composer/videographer Peter Price opened the walk-up loft at the top of the building in 2009 as a research laboratory for dance, and many local and out-of-town artists have worked in the space. On Thursday, Bridge, Zornitsa Stoyanova, and Annie Wilson danced while performance artist Mauri Walton sketched and drew words backward on the freshly painted white walls. It was called situation: becoming and was as much an art installation as a performance.

At the Friday evening show, I waited outside the curtained-off space with a dozen or so other audience members (only 20 are admitted each night) until we were led inside together. We were asked to remove our shoes and invited to lounge on a white futon surrounded by pillows. This was theater-in-the-round flipped, with the audience in the center of the space and all the action revolving around us.

White Roman shades completely covered the huge factory windows on two sides of the space, blocking the magnificent city views. They act as screens for Price’s geometric video treatments that play around the room kaleidoscopically, dizzyingly, making me glad to be already on the floor.

Stoyanova saunters around us faintly smiling, then stops and leans into us, telling us one by one the secret message, which we must pass on. Wilson rocks sideways on a child’s toy. Then they gather, with Bridge on a couch, looking like beautiful mannequins in their white architecturally constructed costumes (by Heidi Barr). Soon they are prancing or skipping around us, stopping to isolate body parts, with even some subtle popping and locking. Wilson disappears into the living quarters to change into a black jumpsuit number with pops of color, and Walton helps her to roll up the shades to the cityscape.

Price sits behind a paper cutout globe like a wizard calmly orchestrating the nuttiness. Wilson sits chopping long-stemmed carrots, Bridge appears in her bunny suit, Stoyanova dresses in hot pink, dancing with a skull, or digs in a pile of soil, Walton lays objects out around the floor until we are each invited over to the bar for a beverage, and the piece just fizzles out in whispering fun.

Posted: Fri, Apr. 27, 2012, 2:08 PM
By Merilyn Jackson
FOR THE INQUIRER

What modern choreographer doesn’t want to sink his teeth into making a new Bolero? Sure, everybody’s done it. But Roni Koresh really made a quirky new one for Koresh Dance Company’s spring opener Thursday night at its home base, the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. Koresh titled the evening’s four works “Out/Line,” which also was the name of the first of three world premieres on the bill.

But it was his fresh take on Bolero that outshone all the other works. Bronislawa Nijinska choreographed the first Bolero, which was commissioned by Ida Rubenstein in 1928. Nijinska set it in a tavern, where Rubenstein danced on tabletop. But composer Maurice Ravel had envisioned the work in a factorylike setting, because its rhythms sounded mechanically driven. Koresh boldly strayed from the usual sensual, even erotic renditions, taking his cue from Ravel’s original vision and adding lots of humorous notes. His sensational dancers even smiled while dancing it, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smiling Bolero before.

There were some signature Koresh gestures throughout: splayed fingers, shaky hands, elbows up, clasped hands, and eyes raised to heaven. But they seemed there as a grounding sign, a cheeky reminder that, hey, this is fun, seriously.

Mechanistically, sometimes even militaristically, the dancers emerge from the black background to the harshly lit (by Robb Anderson) foreground in solos, pairs, and trios, with, eventually, the full company, and then disappear in groups back into the black. Their chic black costumes were by Bela Shehu.

Koresh varies several simple step combinations, mostly walking-based, using them like the music, to build the sensation of the dance. Joe Cotler, Micah Geyer, and Eric Bean are the current male lineup in the now-21-year-old company and, as usual, they carry the load of partnering, though there is no heavy lifting. Here they bend forward, hands on the floor, swinging their legs behind them from side to side. They make wide-open giant steps and when the charming social dancing begins, the women partner and lead each other. Everyone waits for the final falling crescendo of the music, but Koresh adds a teensy coda note with one dancer in a spot, just for laughs.

Out/Line was the evening’s weakest piece, not only for its loud, pointlessly boring music, but also for its relentlessly pugilistic, martial-arts look and length.

The Heart had many moments of sweet appeal, but these long, episodic works are really wearing thin. Who wants to nibble at a gallimaufry of cold scraps when you can feast at a fully conceived and realized banquet like Koresh’s Bolero?

Posted: Fri, Apr. 20, 2012, 5:09 PM
By Merilyn Jackson
FOR THE INQUIRER
                                       Benjamin Von Wong
Wen Wei Wang’s “Night Box” had its premiere Thursday.

In recent years Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal has changed mightily; since I last saw it in Philadelphia eight years ago, the company has replaced all but one of its members, Youri de Wilde. He returned, along with many new faces and some really great legs in the cast to dance the world premiere of Wen Wei Wang’s Night Box as well as Aszure Barton’s Les Chambres des Jacques at the Annenberg Center’s Dance Celebration series Thursday evening. And what crowd-pleasers they were.

Wang’s piece opens with a cluster of dancers, backs to us, isolating torsos, arms, and necks like figures in a video game. As a foggy-night cityscape looms above them in projection, they break into club dancing. One woman is picked to be held aloft, passed from man to man. The men dance in line, holding their hands open in front of their heads. Soon the women slide (which they do in several sequences, all wearing ankle socks) into the line; they fill the men’s empty hands with their heads and form a sort of conga line.

Breaking into couples, they slow-dance, the men languidly groping the women’s buttocks, the women responding by placing their hands up closer to shoulders. Kevin Delaney opens the men’s solos, and a crackling duet between James Gregg and Celine Cassone has her in death-dropping, face-down slides and arabesques; in one, Gregg holds her upraised leg in beautiful arched placement. In all, Night Box is a sexy, noirish dance.

Barton, a rising star in Canadian and U.S. dance with her own company, is well known to Philadelphia audiences, having been here at the Annenberg and at Swarthmore College in the past year, with her signature hit Blue Soup. Her 2006 Les Chambres features strong male solo work, little white flouncy skirts and corsets (by Anne-Marie Veevaete) for the women, and a terrific pastiche of music ranging from Vivaldi arias to the opening strains of Alberto Iglesias’ film score for Talk to Her.

Brett Taylor opened his solo in a square spot with some Irish clogging. Soon the other dancers filled other spots, each alone as in a closed room. Big ronde de jambe des tournees and deep plié kicks marked some of the men’s dances, which really got the best of Barton’s and the audience’s attention in this dance. Ultimately, I wished for a better-balanced program where one of the pieces was less episodic, more flowing.

MERILYN JACKSON
for Broad Street Review
Mar 17, 2012

I don’t know why you’d call German a guttural language, especially when you hear it sung. Depending on the singer, it can be soft and lush like Polish, leering and lurid like English, or seductive and sexy like French.

A singer who captures all these nuances and thousands more is Max Raabe, whose burnished baritone voice veers on the oleaginous with its faux-obsequiousness and then slides into girlish sincerity. Raabe does this by sending the voice exactly where he wants it. Whether he stretches his lips into a large O to throw it to the roof and back of his mouth for a falsetto or relaxes his chin into his chest to drop it into a lower register, he brings it to light with elegant deliberation.

Sometimes Raabe pitches it into his sinuses so that it takes on a more sinister quality— read the silly-sounding word dunkel in German, for sinister. In this instance, dunkel would be a perfect English word for the quality that skirts the edge of the absurd and the contradictory senses underlying everything Raabe sings.

He appeared at the Merriam Theatre for one night only with his Palast Orchester, which was formed with Raabe in the 1980s and still includes many of the same musicians. I’d downloaded some of his songs on my iPod and owned some of his CDs and watched him on YouTube, but I’d never had the chance to see him in person until that night.

Courteous seduction

The experience was anachronistically transporting in the strangest way. Rather than bounding onstage like a vaudevillian or like a louche Weimar cabaret singer of the ’20s and ’30s from where many of his songs spring, Raabe seduced us with his calm intensity, elegance and faux-naif reticence. His pomaded hair, white satin bow tie, tails and patent leather shoes— even his gracile and courteous body nodding his temple away from us as he repairs to the piano to give the musicians some solo moments— all speak of a gentler time, before the unspeakable crimes committed in World War II.

Of course, Raabe carefully never allows any sort of hubris to allude to that grisly episode, as if he hoped time would have stopped while all this delicate and amusing music was popular. And in that suspension of disbelief he made us all complicit.

The wistful Küssen Kann Man Nicht Alleine (“One Cannot Kiss Alone”) is the name of his newest (and I think best) CD, written with the German songwriting sensation, Annette Humpe. Many of the songs that night came from that album.

A lover’s hurt

The title song is one of the best examples of how Raabe pits disparate ideas against one another to jar the listener. It conveys the deep hurt the lover feels when that second, most essential person has gone AWOL:

Kissing is a dual feat
I’m ready for the heat
(and)
I can sing alone
And I can break my own wishbone
(but)
On the couch with you, my sweet,
I’m ready for the heat.

With a cool hand, in both German and English, Raabe sings the sort of lilting songs that our grandparents danced to. In the end, these are almost all dance tunes. In bringing them back to our ears, I hope they find their way to our feet as well. They do find mine as I foxtrot, quick-step and paso doble around my living room alone.

Yes, you can dance alone. But how much better with a willing partner and a great kisser.

Intimate journey

As in the reading of a post-modern novel, intertextuality plays a role in that Raabe creates a level of ambiguity and reference to other times, songs and places, allowing the listener to bring his own interpretation to the lyrics and the presentation of each song. By the night’s bittersweet ending, you feel as if you have been on an intimate journey with Raabe and his band of co-conspirators, the old world/new sound charm of the Palast Orchester.

One of my favorite songs is Ich Küsse Irhe Hand, Madame, from 1928. Raabe and the Orchester didn’t play it that night, but it’s on a couple of his CDs and you can find it on YouTube by many crooners, including Raabe, and a wunderbar rendition by Richard Tauber in a clip with Marlene Dietrich from 1929.

Flirty and charismatic as only certain seven-year old boys can be, Raabe exudes an innocence dripping with teasing playfulness in songs like Ich Bin Nur Wegen Dir Hier (“I’m Only Here For Your Sake”) and In Geheimer Mission (“The Secret Mission”), the rollicking Doktor, Doktor and the devastatingly lovely Du Weisst Nichts Von Liebe (“You Know Nothing About Love”):

The greater the love, the higher the fall,
Final collision is the fight for the sofa.

Now, what could that mean?

Tomorrow’s generation

You don’t need to know much German to catch the meaning in some songs, as in Crisis:

Hallo, Guten Tag, Mein Name ist Krise,” Crisis says when he knocks on your door.

Raabe’s and Humpe’s Lullabye is one I’m learning to sing to my seven-year-old charmer.

Swarms of birds in evening light play tag high in the skies.
Mama Gnu sings baby gnu old bedtime lullabies.
Sun has wandered far to Timbuktu.
Close your eyes so dreams may come to you;
Venus watches over us from outer space;
The moon stares down in disbelief at all that is taking place.
The ocean’s full of tired fish, the squids have gone to bed,
A whale blows bubbles from behind and suddenly turns red.

I think he’ll get it.

Spammer Alert!

Note to Spammers: I am a professional writer with more than 20 years experience. I write every single word that I upload onto my blog and use the blog as a repository for my published work. I would have no need to hire any writers especially at .01 cents per word. What sort of person would write for such peanuts? But you can hire me for $1.00 per word. Merilyn

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