Bureaucracy meets Art

Dominic Favre/European PressPhoto Agency - BIG IDEA Christo and his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, who died in November, with a rendering of “Over the River” in February 2009.
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Slide Show

Christo’s Impact

I have my own pictures of the Gates

Joseph Frank

Google's tribute today on its home page.

Ponte Vecchio

In search of Beethoven

Genius explored. Some interesting scenes with Gianandrea Noseda, Emanuel Ax, Hélène Grimaud. Lots of talk, some rapture. In one set of scenes Maestro Noseda conducts Filarmonica della Scala in Beethoven's Opus 55, Symphony no.3 in E flat major "Eroica" with vim and vigor; when the work ends he kisses the score with Mediterranean passion. In fact, I noted that Mediterraneans showed more passion than others: Hélène Grimaud, playing Opus 73, Piano Concerto no.5 in E flat major "Emperor" shows amazing emotion, near rapture, as she interprets the work.


 Satisfying. Of course, it has a website.

"Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Ben Lando for The Wall Street Journal - Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner rehearses with his Iraqi hosts on the Rasheed Hotel's baby grand.

BAGHDAD—Karim Wasfi, director and conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony, was waiting in the lounge of the Rasheed Hotel one recent afternoon for two things: the arrival of a 13-year-old American pianist scheduled to headline a rare concert here; and the Steinway grand he was supposed to play.
The prodigy, Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner, was coming from New York. The piano was coming from the symphony's rehearsal space, just five miles away from the hotel. Mr. Wasfi was more worried about the piano.

 Mr. Wasfi's orchestra has faced many such obstacles. Its predecessor, the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra, started in 1944 and was shut down again and again over the decades by the strains of war, economics or politics. After Saddam Hussein was deposed, in the postinvasion chaos, Mr. Wasfi recalls, instruments were broken, music sheets ripped, a concert hall burned. "It was a grotesque scene," he says.

In the following years, the orchestra often waited until the last minute to reveal concert times to avoid an attack on such a large, high-profile gathering. Mr. Wasfi says he once took to carrying a sidearm for protection. "Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Mr. Sanchez-Werner, the young pianist, is also a musician with a mission: "to fulfill my passion of doing things for the world…at a humanitarian level." A Juilliard student, he plans to play in Rwanda this summer, for the second time, and says he will perform at the Kennedy Center next year for the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Farm Workers. He performed at the White House in December.

 Thirteen years old? Quite impressive.

Mr. Wasfi wore coattails for the concert. After closing with Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," he and Mr. Sanchez-Werner embraced on stage.

Iraq is "a nation that is so wonderful," the pianist says, "but struggled so much it needs to have something like that in which they can participate."

Lamenting The Future Of the Blues

In early May, I traveled to Memphis to attend the Blues Foundation's 31st annual two-day gala, which included its Hall of Fame induction ceremony and awards banquet. Buddy Guy received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Pinetop Perkins, now 96 years old, turned up, as did 80-year-old Bobby "Blue" Bland and 78-year-old Hubert Sumlin. I heard folk blues, country blues, jump blues, Chicago blues, Delta blues, Texas blues, fast blues, slow blues, good blues and bad blues. What I didn't hear was new blues, and I flew back home no less relieved of my own blues over the genre's troubling future.

Got the blues flying bqack from the blues 'cause of the state of the blues.

Today's blues music isn't only steeped in the past; it's anchored to it. During the performances before and during the banquet, I could trace to almost every song, instrumental solo or vocal style I heard its originator or its most celebrated proponent—and I'm far from an expert on the history of the blues. These tales of heartache, oppression and fleeting joy sounded all too familar.
According to Jay Sieleman, the Blues Foundation's executive director, most blues fans aren't looking for something new. "We all don't want the blues to be the same ol', same ol'," he said, "but it'd better be close."

Laying down the law.

The blues establishment seems to have little interest in reaching out to other musical communities. No rock, hip-hop or jazz artists with a musical debt to the blues were part of the activities in Memphis. Perhaps in turn, blues musicians aren't invited to participate in most major rock festivals...

Keep it pure, ensuring it atrophies; well done.

"We're all worrisome about getting a young audience," XM Satellite Radio's Bill Wax said over sweet tea in Memphis. At the same time, though, he said: "I don't believe the blues world looks for the next big thing. We love people who play around with the form, but we don't want people to mess with the tradition."

Nonsense: keep it pure, resist change, and the music will wither away.

For the blues to have a future in which daring artists bring in new listeners, the establishment needs to share the blues with people who have a different idea of what it is. The future can be built on new modes of expression if musicians and fans remember the blues isn't merely a form. It's a feeling. Capture it, as so many artists did in decades past in so many ways, and you're playing the blues, whether it's with a bottleneck, a big band or a studio full of digital effects.

Jason Moran, the gifted jazz pianist who eagerly explores the blues, explains how he connects with a feeling necessary to make authentic music: "I remember saying to an older musician that I wanted to play bebop, and he said, 'You can't. You didn't live in that time.' That really fired me up to think about what was going on in that time to make those musicians play that way."

That's nonsense, that one can't play it if one didn't live in a particular time; that would make all music die.

"The blues is getting to be like an endangered species," Mr. Guy said by phone. "It's like somebody put a spell on it."

Traditionalists closed to change.

As for Mr. Guy, he profited from some outreach when his daughter Shawnna asked him to appear on "Block Music," her 2006 platinum album. "It's a new thing, a different way," Mr. Guy said of the rap-blues marriage. "Like when Muddy put electricity to the harmonica."

Exactly.

Endless Highway

In reviewing the book You don't look like a Librarian, for The Indexer, I came across the group My Morning Jacket. One of the songs in their 2008 CD, Evil Urges, is Librarian. Eager to hear them, I took the one CD that Peninsula Library owns with them, Endless Highway, a tribute to the music of The Band. One other group on the CD that does a nice job with the song Chest Fever is Widespread Panic.