Jazz giant delivers in KCSM benefit

by Rebecca Rosen Lum

Staff writer, Independent News Group

He may be a “certified senior citizen,” but in his late 60s, jazz giant Mose Allison has never played with more energy, dexterity and drive.

As he says in his own lyric, the "gray-haired geezer" he sees reflected in a window "ain’t the real me.”

In performance at the College of San Mateo Saturday night – one of six benefits he did for all-jazz radio station KCSM – Allison let loose a many-layered cascade of licks that didn’t let up.

The pianist and his two Bay Area sidemen, Mel Graves on bass and George Marsh on drums, kicked off the Saturday show by tearing into a rollicking “Carnival,” featuring an exquisite drum solo by Marsh, a musical percussionist.

From there, Allison dished up the acerbic lyrics and Delta-flavored jazz that have reeled in fans since the 1950s, segueing from “City Home” to “When You Get to the City.”

Allison has said that given his origins, he couldn’t help but be influenced by the blues that surrounded him in his native Mississippi. His predictably hot cover of Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone” revealed how deep his blues roots run.

Who would have guessed he would chase it with a surprisingly up-tempo version of Hank Williams’ “Hey, Good Lookin’” devoid of twang and rendered urbane and funky?

He kept the audience on its toes, following up a pounding cover of Willie Dixon’s “Seventh Son” with the reflective, touching “Hello There, Universe.”

Allison has endeared himself to generations of fans with his spare, poetic lyrics, such as in the tender "My Back Yard" ("My back yard in the moonlight: a buffoon might relax/dispense with wisecracks/start over again").

Sunday night brought a different line-up, including “Certified Senior Citizen" and "Do My Part," with a crackling solo by Graves on bass. Energized by the more lively audience, Allison ripped his jacket off after “Carnival,” and his gray-booted feet never stopped jumping during the remainder of the show.

Rick Reynolds gets to the heart of the matter

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Argus-Courier Staff

For Rick Reynolds, switching the punchline with the set-up gives his routines a poignant staying power.

“I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper and my son Cooper was watching ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos,’” Reynolds told his audience at the Stage Door Theater. “He likes to watch people get hurt,” adding agreeably, “And, really, who doesn’t?”

After the laughter subsided, he added that apropos of nothing, his son climbed onto the couch, kissed him, and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

Reynolds, whose show “All Grown Up – and No Place to Go,” has just been extended to Sept. 3, is bucking the current trend to toss put downs at an audience like so many hand grenades.

Promotional materials say the show pursues the question, “Who would I rather be: the kid I once was, or the adult I am now?”

Promoted energetically as the next big thing in comedy, Reynolds now enjoys a following. When, a short way into the program he announced, “By the way, I’m Rick Reynolds,” the audience burst into prolonged applause. The 300-seat room was filled for this first of two shows.

It’s considerably less shocking than his first foray, “Only the Truth is Funny,” in which he detailed a painful childhood, his father’s early death, and the abuse of his mother first by a stepfather, then a succession of mates.

In that piece, Reynolds careened sometimes too widely for comfort between moments of jarring starkness and that magic zone where belly laughs and tears meet. This show is seamless, tighter, gaining from the narrower focus of the material.

Reynolds looks all grown up, having eschewed the baggy, gray secondhand suit of “Only the Truth” for a better-fitting gray suit. As he talks, he paces back and forth in the set, an ersatz living room.

He talks about his difficulties with his wife, Lisa, who he tells us he “loves more than anything in the world.”

Turns out that while he was surfing the waves of success that came with “Only the Truth,” she was dry-docked with their baby son, and feeling very much alone. She grew to resent his absences, and he resented her for “raining on my parade.”

Clearly, Reynolds is not after easy laughs. In fact, much of his show is not meant to be funny at all.

At times, the show felt like a combination group therapy/motivational speech, with Reynolds telling the audience that if he and Lisa could overcome their marital troubles, we could overcome ours too.

But his anecdotes about marital sex (“Nothing turns a woman on like badgering”) or the combination of love and worry that parents feel for their children brought tear-wiping howls from the audience.

In his funniest bits, he recounted a session with a marriage counselor, a stand-up performance at a Vacaville prison, and walking in his own front door.

It’s not for kids. There are plenty of references to his pre-Lisa s-e-x life. An endearing bit has him confessing how uncomfortable he was disrobing in front of a woman for the first time.

He has the physical grace of Charlie Chaplin and the rubber face of Sid Caesar, and when he uses his physical skills, such as in role playing a guy who has no qualms about disrobing, the effect is hysterical. One wishes for more of these moments.

While the show perhaps suffered from one too many Bradshaw-like moments of revelation, it is refreshingly heartening. Those who flock to comedy clubs to hear jabs, put-downs and ridicule will find little to laugh at here.

On the other hand, it might awaken a latent sense of humanity. Now, there’s an appealing thought.

Smuin mixes styles in new ballet program

by Rebecca Rosen Lum

IJ Reporter

Michael Smuin can do whatever he wants.

In the Smuin Ballet’s new program, which opened at the Cowell Theater Friday night, the former director of the San Francisco Ballet mixed moonwalking, breakdancing and tap with the tour jetes.

It’s pure show biz, and the sell-out crowd loved it.

The show began with “Starshadows,” a paean to lasting love choreographed to music by Ravel. Three couples alternated adagios under a movie-perfect starry sky. The gifted Sara Linnie Slocum, another SFB alumna, created faceted columns of light that enhanced the piece’s dreamy quality.

“Very Merrily, Verdi” offered up the most classically virtuosic of the evening’s three ballets. Particularly impressive were the impeccable Rodolphe Cassand and Claudia Alfieri, who moves with a sinuous musicality.

A planned fourth entry, “Homeless,” was scrapped when the dancer for whom it was created, Herman Piquin, was injured.

But the evening’s highlight was “To the Beatles, Revisited 2001.”

The 12-part ballet was funny, friendly and sweet.

Smuin can put on a show better than anyone: His credits include Broadway plays “Sophisticated Ladies” and “Anything Goes,” for which he won a Tony Award, and films “Rumble Fish,” “Cotton Club” and “The Joy Luck Club,” and many televised “Dance in America” forays.

The many-faceted array of dances to Beatles songs included two reworked in the style of Bach improvisations on piano, to fine effect.

The exquisite Shannon Hurlburt had all the character, swiveling grace and dance vocabulary necessary to bring off the hilarious opener, “Help.” Sure, it mixed styles. People weren’t doing the moonwalk or breakdancing when the Beatles were cutting records.

No matter. It perfectly captured the youth, that spectacularly fleeting burst of energy and bravura that made the Beatles so endearing.

Throughout, Smuin peppered the choreography with surprises, such as Amy Seiwert and Easton Smith’s tandem rowing movement in “Michelle” and Allison Jay’s pointe action atop a pile of blue stools in “Girl.”

Alas, Smuin may have strayed too far afield – even for Smuin – with a solo tap number done by Hurlburt under a blacklight. What, no strobe?

Cassand and Sarah Barber-Wilson danced with witty calypso “And I Love Her” with dash.

But the show-stoppers were Robert Cisneros and Anthony Huxley, two young boys who amazed with classical technique to spare and a voracious appetite for dancing.

In the liner notes, Smuin says his views of the Beatles have changed since he first choreographed to their tunes in the 1980s.

“I saw them as rock ‘n’ roll ruffians smashing ‘50s crew-cut conformity,” he says. This time around, he zeroed in on the wit, earthiness and poignancy that permeate the songs.

Smuin dedicated the piece to his late father, Harold Smuin.

Sandra Woodall crafted the costumes. For whatever it's worth, not since Bejart’s “Ballet du Deuxieme Siecle” have men appeared so consistently bare-chested.

Smuin said in trading the War Memorial Opera House for the Cowell, he has traded “splendor for intimacy, and emphasized personality over spectacle." It also has required him to trade an orchestra for taped music. Would that he could have it all.

Contact Rebecca Rosen Lum via email at rrosenlum@marinij.com.

Easter Eco-Palms do wonders for the wild

Congregations turn to specially produced fronds that help protect rain forests and habitats -- and harvesters.

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Contra Costa Times

Apr. 1--Each year on Palm Sunday, Christians jubilantly re-enact Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, waving a combined 300 million palm fronds in the United States. That makes for a green market in more ways than one.

But environmentalists say the traditional method of harvesting palms wastes more than it nets and damages valuable rain forest. And although sales may shoot through the roof, middlemen consume most of the profits.

Enter Eco-Palms, an ecologically and socially sensitive frond brand.

The niche-market palm comes from a method of harvesting and marketing developed at the University of Minnesota. It preserves more of the species, which in turn protects birds and wildlife that flourish in shaded forests.

Proponents say Eco-Palms will do for the Chamaedorea palm species what Fair Trade has done for coffee and chocolate -- create a sustainably produced crop while generating a good living for communities that harvest it.

The university works with communities in Mexico and Guatemala to produce the fronds, and with Christian denominations to get them into the hands of praying congregants.

Interest is booming: "Oh, my goodness, yes," said Kattie Somerfeld, Fair Trade coordinator for Lutheran World Relief.

Churches in 49 states and, Washington, D.C., Canada, and a U.S. Air Force base in Japan will buy a combined 360,000 Eco-Palm fronds, up from 80,000 last year and 5,000 the year before, Somerfeld said.

"We grew 450 percent from last year to this year," said program coordinator RaeLynn Jones Loss. "Last year, we got the Presbyterians, Catholics and Episcopalians on board. Next year, we'll keep growing."

Eco-Palms don't come cheap. Congregations pay 22 cents per stem -- more than double the cost of traditional palms. But they pay and happily.

"For these indigenous folks who are struggling to make a living, we can support them directly," said Martin Morly, director of worship, music and the arts at Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Lafayette. "Also, the palms are harvested in an ecologically sound, sustainable manner."

Eco-Palm harvesters earn their pay based on the quality of the fronds they deliver, not the weight of the crop.

"Now they know how to cut the palms so they keep growing," Jones Loss said. The trees with serviceable fronds continue to regenerate, and the imperfect palm is left alone, preserving its shade value. With a traditional harvest, 50 percent is lost in the sorting process, she said.

The harvesters capture a higher price because they do all the sorting and packaging themselves. For each frond, they receive a 5-cent premium that comes back to their community. Groups have used that money for scholarships, teacher salaries and expanded packaging centers to accommodate the rising demand.

Congregations in Berkeley, Clayton, Castro Valley, Lafayette, Richmond and Walnut Creek will use Eco-Palms for the first time in today's Palm Sunday services.

"We ordered one for each person," said Dianne Werner, secretary at Clayton Valley Presbyterian Church. "We don't even know what they look like."

Churches integrate palms into services in different ways. Parishioners at Grace Lutheran Church in Richmond listen to the story of Palm Sunday outside, then carry the fronds into the sanctuary, singing, said music director Martin Schaefer.

At Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Castro Valley, congregants take home the palms, which are folded into the shape of the cross. They tuck them into a dresser or bathroom mirror and bring them back next year to burn on Ash Wednesday.

Holy Cross parishioners already drink Fair Trade coffee, and they scrapped foam cups in favor of recyclable ones. Youths raised $5,000 to buy livestock for impoverished villages.

"We're doing things like that," said the Rev. Mark Spaulding. "It's stewardship of, as we say, 'this fragile Earth, our island home.' As far as ecology goes, man! We're that little blue marble out in space."