Dave Weckl
Multi-reedman and University City native Marty Ehrlich has a new CD, News On The Rail, reviewed here...Drummer Dave Weckl is on tour with his band, including bassist Tom Kennedy, another St. Louisan, and did a brief interview with the Indianapolis Star before his gig in Indy...Pat Metheny, who originally hails from near Kansas City and who performed here in St. Louis at the TouPAC a week ago, apparently tore it up at this weekend's Monterey Jazz Festival...Among his many other writing gigs, local scribe Terry Perkins does a monthly preview of upcoming local jazz shows for the All About Jazz Web site. The October edition is here...Jan Shapiro, a former St. Louisan who now heads the vocal department at Berklee College of Music in Boston, was recently in St. Louis to do research and renew old ties (scroll down for item)...The Miles Radio weblog looks at possible reasons for the delay in the release of Miles Davis' Cellar Door Sessions box set...Oliver Nelson is among the composers and arrangers to be featured in a big band repertory concert in St. Petersburg, FL...Speaking of composers: Joan Tower, who once held the composer-in-residence position at the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, was recently in Glen Falls, NY for the debut of a new orchestral piece that was the product of a new type of partnership designed to give small-budget and community orchestras the opportunity to commission a major composer by pooling resources. And elsewhere on the contemporary orchestral music front, Marin Alsop, who once held the "creative conductor" chair at SLSO, has begun her tenure as music director of the Baltimore symphony. Alsop is the first woman to serve as music director of a major American orchestra, but not everyone is pleased with her appointment.
Finally, a couple of bits of music-related media commentary. I couldn't help but be amused by the reference to the "famous Laclede's Landing jazz scene" in a New York Times real estate section article, considering there hasn't been anything bearing the slightest resemblance to a jazz club in that part of town since the Eighties. In fact, since the live music scene on the Landing is virtually dead, with two or three clubs offering bands in an area that once had more than a dozen such venues, I wonder where the NYT is getting their information. Maybe the only reference they had on St. Louis was a 20-year-old copy of Where magazine ....
Given his stature as a jazz legend, it's no surprise that Wayne Shorter attracts a lot of media attention wherever he goes. And after his recent concert in St. Louis, Shorter was most complimentary to the Symphony musicians who took part in the program and to conductor David Robertson.
But what exactly did those Symphony musicians do? You won't find out much by reading the Post-Dispatch's review, which does a reasonably workmanlike job of recounting the play-by-play of the show, but barely mentions the Orchestra players at all. Given that the collaboration between Shorter's quartet and the SLSO musicians was the raison d'etre for this concert, one might hope for some description of the parts the Orchestra members played, and perhaps some analysis of how the additional musicians and new arrangements may have changed the compositions or the Quartet's approach to the music. But in this case, there's no such description or analysis to be found - the review doesn't even say who wrote the arrangements for the string players, which would seem to be a fairly significant omission.
Critics, reviewers and music journalists have an important role to play in the process of introducing new music to the public. A thoughtful review can help listeners understand what they've heard, put it in context, and judge its artistic success (or failure). Given the vagaries of the editorial process, I understand that what appears in print is not always what the writer originally wrote. And certainly print journalists have space limitations that prevent them from going as far in depth as some readers might prefer. But in this case, the reviewer spends about 25% of the word count speculating about why Shorter and the Quartet didn't do any free-form playing, which seems to me to be both an unrealistic expectation for this concert and a sad waste of space in the review. The Post's readers and the artists involved deserve better.
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