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JOHN SEYFRIED Jazz On Campus Oberlin Stages Pekar’s Jazz Opera Harvey Pekar (left) watches Oberlin students perform Leave Me Alone Emotional divas, portly tenors, over-the-top drama and preposterously broad comedy, all performed before tuxedo-clad audiences in gigantic concert halls. These are the conventions of opera—easily identified by anyone over the age of 10 with a working knowledge of Bugs Bunny. “[Theater and opera director] Peter Sellars called it a lobotomized art form,” said Paul Schick, artistic director of Real Time Opera, a small New Hampshire-based production company. “Opera defines classification because its premises are so absurd.” This is why Real Time is dedicated to creating shows that go way out of the box to challenge preconceptions about operatic subject matter (physicist Richard Feynman), venue (New York’s Knitting Factory) and musical composition (one show created and performed by John Trubee and the Ugly Janitors of America). Now it has created an opera with a libretto by Harvey Pekar, the professionally misanthropic author of the comic book American Splendor. “Once you’re thinking in terms of reinventing an art form,” Schick said, “Harvey’s a natural choice.” The result of that choice is Leave Me Alone, a comic jazz opera in the form of a meditation on how art clashes with modern culture and everyday life, composed by California-based saxophonist Dan Plonsey and written in collaboration with the Pekar. The show, which had its premiere—and only performance—on Jan. 31, was staged at Finney Chapel on Oberlin College’s Ohio campus. It was simulcast live on leavemealoneopera.com. For the students at Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music who performed Plonsey’s offbeat music behind this equally offbeat take on opera, Leave Me Alone offered an opportunity for growth that isn’t as readily accessible through older works. “In academia we are constantly looking backwards, but it’s equally critical to look toward the future,” said David Stull, dean of the 86 DOWNBEAT April 2009 conservatory, which also staged the 2007 U.S. premiere of an Austrian composer’s operatic interpretation of David Lynch’s film Lost Highway. “Harvey’s not trapped by convention and he’s not afraid for the show to have jagged edges. What’s interesting about this is that it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before. No student can say, ‘Oh, I understand this because I’ve done it.’” That was particularly true for Noah Hecht, a drummer and one of the students who provided the show’s musical backdrop. “I was intrigued by a jazz opera,” Hecht said. “Dan doesn’t have drum parts written, so it’s been exciting for me to get inside of the music and find out what to channel and where things are coming from.” Plonsey initially conceived Leave Me Alone as the loosely fictional story of a musician struggling to make his art in the face of domestic responsibilities. When he brought fellow Cleveland native Pekar on board, the show began to change. “Before I could even get far in describing the show, Harvey said, ‘I’m in the habit of taking any work that’s paying me,’” Plonsey said. “But he sees things in a unique way.” Pekar’s vision was something experimental and reality-based, a show about its own creation, peppered with personal monologues by himself, Plonsey and both of their wives, with everyone involved playing themselves. The opening, developed and performed by Pekar, is a polemic about modern society’s intolerance of and failure to support avant-garde and cutting-edge art, which he believes will lead to the destruction of a worthwhile mainstream. “I used to work at a Veterans Administration hospital and a doctor there had a subscription to the Cleveland Orchestra. When they’d play something even mildly challenging, like Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird Suite,’ this guy would be furious,” Pekar said. “I wanted to lecture people about that—at the beginning—so they had no chance to misunderstand me.” —Joshua Karp School Notes Grammy Lessons: Saxophonist Gerald Albright (above) performed with high school students from the Grammy Jazz Ensembles at Spaghettini Italian Grill & Jazz Club in Seal Beach, Calif., on Feb. 2. Terence Blanchard also performed with the ensembles that week. The high school musicians from across the country were selected for the week of instruction, which included lessons from Justin DiCioccio of the Manhattan School of Music and Ron McCurdy of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. They also recorded a CD at Capitol Studios. Details: grammy.com Kentucky Bear Hug: The University of Louisville’s School of Music has marked four years of its Open World Leadership Cultural Program with the new two-CD set Jazz Connection (Sea Breeze). The discs feature collaborations between the school’s students and faculty and Russian jazz musicians. Details: louisville.edu Northwest Voices: Vocalists Nancy King and Billy Gaechter sat in with the Mt. Hood Community College Jazz Ensemble in Oregon for the group’s new disc, Doin’ The Best Deeds (Sea Breeze). Details: mhcc.edu Skidmore Summer: Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., has announced details for its summer Jazz Institute, which will run from June 27–July 11. The program accepts students high school age and older. Instructors include Curtis Fuller and Bill Cunliffe. Details: skidmore.edu Canadian Fellowships: Canadian universities are offering postdoctoral fellowships for studying the social value of improvisation. The grants are for the University of Guelph, McGill University and Université De Montréal for the 2009–’10 academic year. The application deadline is April 30. Details: improvcommunity.ca
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