arts & entertainment Rock Royalty Al Kooper will take the stage at Music Hall. Suzanne Chessler Contributing Writer A 1 Kooper — in a long career of performing, recording, song- writing and producing — has worked on many hits and with many chart-topping stars: "Short Shorts" with the Royal Teens, "Child Is Father to the Man" with Blood Sweat & Tears (a group he organized), "Like a Rolling Stone" with Bob Dylan and "All Those Years Ago" with George Harrison, among many others. Kooper, 68, also has spotlighted many musical styles, with his most recent recording, White Chocolate, released in 2008. His work recently has been sampled by hip-hop artists Jay Z, the Beastie Boys and the Alchemist. Metro Detroiters can get samplings of it all during A Very Special Solo Evening With the Legendary Al Kooper on Thursday, May 17, in the Music Hall Jazz Cafe, where he will play piano and guitar. Kooper previewed the show and revealed his current interests during a phone conver- sation with the Detroit Jewish News: JN: What will you be performing in Detroit? AK: I never like to say; I like the ele- ment of surprise. I get there and see how the sound is and if everything's working OK. I come out and look at the audience and decide what to play. IN: How does working solo compare to working with a band? AK: Playing solo is a lot more respon- sibility. What I can do alone that I can't do with a band is explain where the songs come from and tell stories about them. People will get to know me better than in a band show. IN: What do you recall about earlier work in Detroit? AK: Playing the Grande Ballroom with Blood Sweat & Tears was an exciting gig. I also played outside for a fabulous festival with about 3,000 people in the audience. I have a friend, poet and teacher M.L. Liebler, who has taken me to stores where they have hard-to-get CDs. I like to shop for those. IN: Have you worked with Motown art- ists? AK: I don't think I ever worked with a Motown artist. I'm a gigantic fan and even bought a karaoke boxed set so I could have copies of the actual tracks. A song that Blood, Sweat & Tears did — "You've Made Me So Very Happy" — was a Motown song that I got from an old record and just changed the arrangement. IN: What are your current projects? AK: I'm working on a documentary, a four-CD boxed set and probably the last album that I'm going to do. It should take four years to finish. IN: Do you have any favorite artists now? AK: I like a band called Field Music from England and Mount Moriah from down South. Their music reaches me on some level. JN: How did you come to write a weekly Web column, "New Music for Old People for the Morton Report? AK: They came to me, and I thought the best thing I could write about would be the new music that I listen to. I go to iTunes every Tuesday, pick 10 releases and write about them. I stream the entire songs in the columns. I also take things that are very old — from the '60s-'90s — and put them in if Wils on We bb, courtesy Sony P ictu res Cla ss ic s Big-Screen Boomers A new Kasdan film with Detroit roots. Curt Schleier Special to the Jewish News F filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan attended the University of Michigan. It's where he met his wife and frequent collaborator, Meg (nee Goldman), a Detroit native. And it is where Meg's sister provided a criti- cal plot point for his latest film, Darling Companion. The movie is the third in Kasdan's baby boomer trilogy. It started with his post- college, let's-become-adults-film, The Big Chill. Next came the movie about middle age, Grand Canyon, followed now by Darling Companion, about empty nesters. Beth (Diane Keaton) and Joseph Winter (Kevin Kline) are married long enough to figure out what they don't like about each other. He thinks she's high-strung and overly emotional; she feels he's pompous and self-involved. Matters come to a head when the cou- ple's rescue dog is lost at their mountain vacation home, and family and friends unite in their search for the mutt. Meg Kasdan, who was music supervisor on The Big Chill and co-screenwriter on Grand Canyon and this new film, got the idea when the Kasdans lost their own res- cue dog while on a Rocky Mountain trek. To better enable the film to work, the couple "borrowed" an incident from Meg's sister, who found a wounded dog by the 46 May 10 • 2012 side of a Detroit highway and rescued, adopted and named him — Freeway, scenes all rather faithfully re-enacted on the screen. Taking inspiration from real life is not unusual. What is different in Darling Companion is that there's not a single CGI effect. It is that increasingly rare film made for the most ignored of all cinema demographics: intelligent adults. "I think there's still hope" for these kinds of films, Lawrence Kasdan said in a telephone interview."It's harder and harder to get movies made that you're interested in. That's why this was made independently. We didn't think a studio would make a movie about 60-year-olds, about real people. So when we finished the script, we immediately started look- ing for independent financing." All tolled, Kasdan has directed 11 films, most of them critical and financial suc- cesses. While they vary greatly in genre — from The Accidental Tourist to French Kiss — they share an intelligence and Jewish feel. The director agrees: "I think they're completely, totally Jewish," he says. "I am a secular Jew, and that infuses my sense of humor, it infuses my world view, it infuses what I consider my religion, which is humanism, and it all comes from my Jewish background." That background not only informs his worldview, but it has pushed him to succeed. Actress Diane Keaton and Director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of "When you grow up feeling like an outsider, even if you had a good experi- ence, it helps you as an artist',' he says. "It makes you more interested in telling your version of the world:' Though Kasdan was born in Miami, he was raised in that hotbed of Judaism: West Virginia. "We had a community in Wheeling and a much smaller one in Morganstown. There was a casual kind of anti-Semitism there when I was growing up in the '50s. It didn't feel malicious. It was just part of the language. You know the kind of lan- guage. It was the parlance of teenage kids, raised in that kind of atmosphere, repeat- ing words they heard at home. They didn't realize how much it hurt me." Kasdan still tries "to be involved" with U-M. He gave permission to use the title The Big Chill at the Big House for the Michigan-Michigan State matchup in December 2010 and has spoken at corn- Darling Companion mencement, among other appearances. After graduation, at the height of the Vietnam War, he intended to teach high school English (teaching provided defer- ment) and write screenplays on summer breaks. But it was impossible to get a job. He went instead into advertising and in off hours wrote the script for The Bodyguard, which took years to get from his pages to the screen. However, Kasdan was recognized for his work long before that happened. He won a Clio Award for one of his ads. As if to prove that the universe has a sense of irony, the ad was for — wait for it — West Virginia Brand Bacon. E Darling Companion is scheduled to open in area theaters on Friday, May 18.