Jazz this week: Ken Page, Miller, Mulkerhar & Lefkowitz-Brown, C. Spencer Yeh & Andrew Lampert, Mark Lettieri, Anat Cohen & more

It's a busy week for live jazz and creative music in St. Louis, with performances in styles ranging from cabaret to vintage jazz to fusion to experimental intermedia and beyond.

Let's go to the highlights...

Wednesday, April 4
Singer, actor and St. Louis native Ken Page, now living back in his hometown after a distinguished career on Broadway and in film, will perform his cabaret show for the first of two nights at Jazz at the Bistro .

Page (pictured, top left), whose resume includes the original casts of Ain't Misbehavin' and Cats, will be making his debut at the Bistro with these shows, and the demand for tickets should be high, so advance reservations are strongly suggested.

Also on Wednesday, the weekly "Grand Center Jazz Crawl" features saxophonist Austin Cebulski and guitarist Tom Byrne at The Stage at KDHX; the jam session led by bassist Bob DeBoo at the Kranzberg Arts Center; and trumpeter Kasimu Taylor's band at The Dark Room.

Thursday, April 5
Roya and the High Timers perform vintage jazz and swing for the monthly "Koken House Shout" at Koken Art Factory; saxophonist Dave Stone brings his trio to The Dark Room; and pianist Adam Maness' trio will be back at Thurman's in Shaw.

Friday, April 6
Drummer Allison Miller, trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown wrap up a week-long educational residency for Jazz St. Louis with the first of two evenings of performances at Jazz at the Bistro. (As with past occasions when JSL has assembled an ad hoc band from among visiting clinicians,  the three NYC-based musicians presumably will be supported by local players on bass and piano or guitar, but as of this writing Jazz St. Louis hasn't shared any information as to who they'll be.)

Also on Friday, singer Ken Haller will reprise his cabaret show "Song by Song by Sondheim" for the first of two nights at the Kranzberg Arts Center, and Miss Jubilee plays for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom.

Saturday, April 7
New Music Circle presents musician C. Spencer Yeh and artist, filmmaker and St. Louis native Andrew Lampert (pictured, bottom left) in a collaborative performance at The Luminary.

You can find out more about both men and see some related videos in this post from last Saturday.

Also on Saturday, guitarist Mark Lettieri, known for his work as a member of Snarky Puppy, leads a trio at The Ready Room; singer and actor Norm Lewis will perform music from Broadway and the Great American Songbook at the Sheldon Concert Hall; and trumpeter Jim Manley leads at trio at the house concert venue KindaBlue Club.

Sunday, April 8
The Arcadia Dance Orchestra will perform vintage pre-war jazz in a matinee at Christ Church Cathedral, and the Coleman Hughes Project with singer Adrianne Felton-King will present a "Tribute to Sade" at The Signature Club.

Monday, April 9
Dizzy Atmosphere plays for diners at The Shaved Duck; the Webster University Jazz Collective will perform in concert at Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster campus; and singer and impressionist Dean Christopher brings his "Rat Pack & More" show back to One 19 North Tapas and Wine Bar.

Tuesday, April 10
Clarinetist Anat Cohen brings her Tentet to McKendree University's Hettenhausen Center for the Arts in Lebanon, IL (which, for those contemplating the drive, is roughly the same distance from the Gateway Arch as Chesterfield.)

For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: C. Spencer Yeh and Andrew Lampert

This week, let's take a look at some videos featuring musician and artist C. Spencer Yeh and artist, curator and filmmaker Andrew Lampert, who will be joining forces for a performance presented by New Music Circle next Saturday, April 7 at The Luminary.

Yeh is a violinist, vocalist and electronic musician who studied film in college; Lampert is an artist and filmmaker who frequently collaborates on multimedia performances and sometimes plays music. For their St. Louis show, each man will do a separate set, and then they'll perform together for the evening's finale.

Born in Taiwan, Yeh studied film at Northwestern University in Chicago and is known for his musical project Burning Star Core and for collaborations with artists such as Tony Conrad, Thurston Moore, Jandek, Ben Hall and Don Dietrich, Nate Wooley, Colin Stetson, Okkyung Lee, John Wiese, Chris Corsano, and many others.

Lampert, who's originally from St. Louis, was trained as a film archivist and previously was a curator for Anthology Film Archives in New York City. In his own work, he "explores the cinematic experience as content, experimenting with the physical spaces between projector, projectionist, audience and screen, and with the experiences made possible through their convergence."

What this most likely means in terms of their performance here is that Lampert will be projecting images from a variety of sources – 8mm film, 16mm film, and digital video - and cutting and mixing them in real time, presumably in response to the sounds Yeh is producing with his violin, vocals, and electronic gear running through a quadrophonic (i.e four discrete channels) sound system.

Since this will be the first time that Yeh and Lampert will have performed together, there's no way to "preview" the show in any meaningful sense, and in any case, an online video is only going to capture a portion of what happens in a multi-media show like the one they'll be doing.

What is possible, though, is to show you some of the work Yeh and Lampert have done individually, in hopes of conveying some idea of what their collaboration may be like.

The first video up above is a recording of Yeh's performance at the 2017 New Media Art & Sound Summit in Austin, TX, in which he's using his quadrophonic setup to process and playback material drawn from recordings of the RCA Mark II synthesizer, the first programmable synthesizer ever built.

After the jump, you can see two more of Yeh's solo performances, from March 2014 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, TX, and March 2012 at Studio Soto in Boston, that demonstrate more of the range of his sets.

The fourth clip is a 2014 interview with Yeh, in which he talks about the development of his work, the Burning Star Core project, and his approaches to using voice, violin and abstract sound.

As for Lampert, the nature of his performance work makes it difficult to document in the usual ways, so there's not much pertinent footage available online. That said, today's fifth video is a recording of a gig he did with percussionist Chris Corsano in 2014 in Austin, TX that may have some relevance to how he'll approach his St. Louis performance. The sixth and final clip is a brief excerpt from a performance that Lampert did with video artist Greg Pope in 2011 in Norway, offering another glimpse of his live modus operandi.

For more about Andrew Lampert, read the brief feature about him from 2010 in Bomb magazine, and his 2014 interview published on the website of the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

For more about C. Spencer Yeh, read the feature story about him in the December 2017 issue of Interview magazine and the interview with him published in 2016 on the website of Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...