The Michigan Daily-Wednesday, March 30, 1978-Page 5

Chamber music mush

Byrd, Hasting Street Experience

bring jazz 'paradise'

By KERRY THOMPSON
COMMITTEES rarely do anything glaringly wrong. On
the other hand, they rarely do anything brilliantly
inspired. Saturday night's Orpheus Chamber Ensemble
concert was consistent with this evaluation.

Orpheus Chamber Ensemble
with Festival Chorus
f-illo4uditoriumn
Ballet'music from ldomeneo".........Mozart
Serenade Notturno..................... Mozart
3 Coronation Anthems................. Handel
Adagio for clarinet and strings..........Wagner
Sinfonia Concertante................ Mozart
Donald Bryant, conduct'or

inspiration. The ensemble lacked artistic direction, and
seemed to meander without making any genuinely artistic
statement. It was not a matter of crescendos and
decrescendos, accents and legatos, either. What was
missing was an almost indefinable seeking of an aesthetic
goal.
One piece that escaped this nebulousness and stood out
as a genuine artistic highlight was Wagner's Adagio for
Clarinet 4nd Strings, featuring a superb performance by
clarinetist Jane Hamborsky. The orchestra followed
Hamborsky and wove a spell of beautiful sounds that
mesmerized the audience.
The Handel Anthems were well done, but made the
program too long. They could easily have been replaced
by another shorter piece more in keeping with the cham-
ber music nature of the concert. This is not a reflection on
the Festival Chorus or its talented director Donald
Bryant; the chorus performed with facility and sen-
sitivity. However, the piece just didn't fit into a concert of
classical and romantic chamber music. el
The Mozart Serenade was pleasant to hear. The soloists
were uniformly excellent, although the orchestra's
playing was too martellato in some sections for a really
graceful Mozart style. Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante was
also well done, showing off the virtuosity of the four wind
soloists nicely.
One has to admire this group of young musicians who
are successfully presenting chamber music in an authen-
tic style. Perhaps they do not need a conductor - they do
many things well without one - but they do need some ar-
tistic direction.

The orchestra played all the right notes, often with im-
pressive technical skill. The precision was there, also -
the lack of a conductor did not have as much effect on this
as one would expect, perhaps because the musicians
listened to each other better than they would have other-
wise.
The balance was fine, except that the winds sometimes
tended to overpower the strings; that, however, is a
characteristic of Hill Auditorium, and probably not the
orchestra's fault. Individual expression was remarkable;
soloists seemed to let it go when not restricted by a con-
ductor's presence.
NEVERTHELESS, something was lacking - possibly

Holocaust drawings exude horror

By KAREN BORNSTEIN
THE NICE thing about a night-;
mare is waking up, only to be left
with a memory. Barry Avedon creates
the memories of a nightmare, from
which he could not awaken. The night-
mare was the Nazi era. The memories
are his crayon and pencil drawings,
currently on exhibit at the Michigan
Union through March 31. They are en-
titled "Let Us Not Forget." Unfor-
tunately, most of them are forgotten
much too easily.
Avedon, a native of New York City,
was educated at Rochester Institute of
Technology, and has received many
awards for his excellence in painting.
He has exhibited at both the Buffalo
Albright-Knox Museum and the Detroit
Institute of Art. Currently, Avedon is an
Associate Professor of Fine Arts at
Eastern Michigan University where he
teaches drawing and painting.
Avedon's recent works are attempts
at depicting the severe sense of
loneliness and destruction experienced
in war. He utilizes different media and
style throughout his pieces, some being
exceedingly more effective than others.
Electronic Landscape is a
conglomeration of harsh mechanical
forms which interact on paper like
human beings. Cold, distorted wires,
scissors in the midst of cutting, elec-
trical plugs and swelling nuts and bolts
appear to be doing a sinister dance
around sharp geometric forms. Avedon
sketches these impersonal, sterile ob-
jects in an apimated, cartoonish man-
ner. The thin, exaggerated black ink
lines help the forms take on a light, yet
eerie appeal and makes the work an in-
triguing satire.
Other ink drawings aren't as suc-
cessful in making such a symbolic
statement. For example, Raisin Bread
lacks the cartoonish appeal or stylistic
depth needed to captivate the viewer.
Stark black outlines of an avocado, egg,
knife; cabbage and loaf of raisin bread
lay flatly against a sea of white open
space: They are empty figures placed
against an empty background, but no
empty feeling evolves.
-In many of his works, Avedon attem-
pts to express utter chaos, confusion
and terror. However, his jumbled,
distorted human bodies, straight
angular forms and unbalanced open
spaces neither creep together to
produce one neat bundle of panic, nor
do they work in harsh opposition to each
other, evoking a sense of nervous ten-
sion.
More effective is the introduction of
color to many of Avedon's works,

.._..

especially the addition of color to the
human form. As his drawings become
more heavily laden with the screaming
pinks, greens and yellows, traditional
of the German . Expressionists,
Avedon's works begin to permeate with
a greater sense of anguish and disrup-
tion.
THESE ABUSIVE colors are too
dominating to melt gradually into one
another. Instead, they exist unto them-
selves, emanating with the sense of
humafi isolation. Each colorful body is
physically and emotionally detached
from all others surrounding it. The
bodies are colored with a frenzied hand
and are broken into individual units of
energy which seem to cry with painful
electricity.
Avedon's use of a recurring skeleton
motif is far too direct and conceptual to
supply the viewer with the intense gut
feeling of death and chaos. The literal
skeletal representations merely hold
Avedon's technical artistic ability up
high. There is nothing haunting or
penetrating about the image. Upon
seeing it the viewer intellectualizes,
and is unable to let the skeleton appeal

specifically to emotion, in order to
generate a sense of panic.
Incredibly more gripping is Avedon's
Let Us Not Forget #3. This work con-
sists of a haphazard mass of appen-
dages and body parts amidst a small
swastika, spurning forth with enough
horror to keep the drawing exuding
panic.
The forms are in unnaturally,
strained contortions. An uncomfortable
feeling begins to swell inside the viewer
as the entire work as a whole thrives
with a pulsating sense of panic; the
panic of a nightmare that is
inescapable.
TYPEWRITER
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By MATTHEW KLETTER
F ROM THE onslaught of Sunday,
night's Composers Concept Per-
formance with Donald Byrd and the
Paradise Theater Orchestra at the
Paradise Theatre, one could tell that
one was in for a grand performance. A
big time production beginning with
thirty-three performers, including six
trumpet players, three trombone
players, seven sax men, three female
singers and two dancers. Why the dan-
cing ladies? Because it was a
homecoming for Dr. Donald Byrd and
his many associates who, in their
younger days, would skip school (Cass
Tech) to go to the Paradise and play
with the giants of jazz. Trumpeteer
Byrd has played with such masters as
John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk.
Even in recent days Byrd plays with
masters such as saxophonist Sonny
Rollins.
The program featured three acts led
off by the Paradise Theatre Orchestra.
This week the Orchestra was composed
of the Hasting Street Experience and
other musicians prescribed by Dr.
Byrd. The Hasting Street Experience,
founded in 1972 to preserve Detroit's
jazz heritage that had its birth on
Hasting Street which is presently the
Chrysler Freeway. Talking with
vibraharpist Nasir Hafiz . (Abe
Woodley), a. true olt-timer from the
Hasting Street days, Hafiz recalls,
"You weren't supposed to go from
Black Bottom to the Northern End, bUt
I did anyways". Referring to his fellow
musicians Hafiz says, "I knew them all
when they were 18 and 19. I've seen
various changes but the main thing to
me is playing, creating and teaching
the younger ones to play and create."
The show also featured Kim Weston,
a multi-talented woman who most
recently is working in the Community-
based theatrical productions at the
Langston Hughes theatre as a producer
and organizer.
INSIDE THE beat-up theatre with
flaked cement walls, the band perfor-
med the hottest jazz presently in
Detroit. Directed by Hasting's Miller
Brisker, the orchestra rolled through
several be-bop arrangements to a well-
dressed integrated crowd filled nearly
to capacity. The Hasting Street set in-
cluded fourteen selections highlighted
by a scat-style female vocalist who kept
on top of the hot jazz as it was being
layed down.
The most spectacular points of the
Paradise set were found in the
"Liberation Suite/Ballet" featuring the
dancing women that add a sensual and
seductive touch to the performance.
Watching,the dancers perform to live
jazz was a fantasy capable of taking
more attention than the music.
Kim Weston came on soon after the
dancers, performing a Dinah
Washington medley including "Evil
Gail Blues" and "What a difference a

day makes". Weston's addition to the
show made the Paradise really cook.
She closed the first half of the show with
a composition called "Detroit" with an
arrangement by Teddy Harris Jr. This
song reached the hearts of many in the
audience by merging Hasting Street
and Motown into the renaissance jazz of
present-day Detroit. It's tunes like this
that ought to be the theme song of
Detroit for radio and television stations
to use as an ad for cultural activity in
the urban center.
Byrd took the stage after a brief in-
termission bringing with him some cool

'Detroit
jazz to finish off a cold Detroit winter.
His trumpet runs are less energetic
than someone like Woody Shaw but in
many ways more understandably in-
tegrated. Byrd told the audience that he
was "very happy to be home for
Easter" and proceeded to play a fine
set which was well distributed among
the musicians. The composition "Black
Jack" brought out three other trumpet
playrs for Byrd to duel with. This
prompted some of them to reach some
fine moments in trumpet playing. His
last selection "Osaje Fu," which was
dedicated to John Coltrane, displayed
the influence Coltrane had on Byrd and
the feelings Coltrane evoked in him.
Speaking to Byrd after the show I
received some of 'his impressions on the
musical happenings that have been oc-
curring for the last eighty years in
Detrot. Byrd spoke of the city: "There
is something in this city that merits a
whole study, from the McKinney Cotton
Pickers of 1900 to the present . . . you
will not find the continuum that has
happened in this city ... for this city
has contributed more musicians than
any other city."
The next artist to appear in the Comn-
posers Concept Series will betDetroit
bred Yusef Lateef on Sunday, April 16
The show will also feature the Detroit
Voices with the Paradise Theatre Or-
chestra. As Donald Byrd would say,
"This town continues to have its day."


THE AFTER BASH
starring TUCKER BLUES BAND
SAT., APRIL 1-7:30-1:00
MICHIGAN UNION BALLROOM
SPONSORED BY N. State Pub
Union Programming
UAC
Beer, Mixed Drinks, Dancing

$1.50 Cover

Due to an increased interest in PSYCHIC PHENOMENA, LADY ATHENA is
conducting a seminar and workshop, Aparil 1st and 2nd, 1978, at the Ra-
mada Airport Inn, on some phases of this subject. Classes are limited to
the first 30 persons registering.
LADY ATHENA
PSYCHIC PHENOMENA WORKSHOP TOPICS INCLUDE:
* TELEPATHY
" CLAIRVOYANCE
* AUTOVOYANGE
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" DISCUSSION OF WITHCRAFT REINCARNATION
Call for more Information-981-0719

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c -fVie L e )c:that wiled
by Jean Anouilh
University Sh(mwcase
Productions
TRUEBLOOD THEATREWed.Sat Mar 29-Apr.1 8 p m
Tickets at Trueblood Box Office, 6-8p.m
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AVAILABLE ONLY at the U. CELLAR,
All cap & gown orders must be placed by
MARCH 29, 1978
degree cap & gown hood deposit TOTAL
Bachelor $6.25 2.00 8.25
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