Category: So Little Time

Let’s not get too hung up on labels like "Rising Stars."
At age 48, with 17 discs of wildly varying merit to his credit (I’m one of the
precious few who loved his ’80s meld of jazz and hip hop), saxophonist Greg Osby
is less a rising star that an established albeit iconoclastic member of the jazz
firmament. Ditto trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, who joined Wynton Marsalis’s band
back in 1989, and 51-year old guitarist Dave Stryker.

Instead if trying to pigeonhole the ages and career
stations of the nine musicians tabbed to participate in this highly enticing
concert, let’s just stipulate that all of them are top-notch technicians
interested in both pushing the envelope and enhancing the tradition of jazz
through their compositions and arrangements. And as opposed to the Young Lions
marketing hype of the 1980s, even the twentysomethings in the group have
impressive pedigrees. Trumpeter (and the curator for this project) Sean Jones
and pianist Dan Nimmer both have been reared in Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra; saxophonist Marcus Strickland was first caught locally blowing away
Artists Quarter patrons on the bandstand with drummer Roy Haynes. And 32-year
old trumpeter Jeremy Pelt got his start with the Mingus Big Band.

Everyone I just mentioned in an agile, probing stylist,
and thoroughly grounded in jazz scholarship. In a repertory set-up somewhat similar to the SF Jazz
Collective, each member of the group has written new arrangements to jazz
standards and will perform them with various permutations of the ensemble. This
is musically specifically commissioned for this concert, bringing together some
musicians who rarely if ever have played together. It’s a great way to honor and
further enrich jazz, the music famously dubbed "the sound of
surprise."

It has been more than 40 years since renowned French writer/director Claude Lelouch won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and multiple Oscars for A Man and a Woman in 1966. But praise in the French press has eluded Lelouch, even after releasing 40 films since.

So, to test the bias of the press, and see if a good film by an unknown director would be received differently, Lelouch released Roman de Gare last year under an assumed name … Hervé Picard. The result was another trip to Cannes and the critical acclaim he had been waiting for.

A clever mystery thriller that takes many twists and turns down the paths of mystery, comedy, and romance, Roman de Gare was a box office success in France — one that made its female lead, newcomer Audrey Dana (making her film debut), into a domestic star.

The movie opens with the ending, as successful, yet desperate, novelist Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is interrogated by police about the disappearance of her ghost writer.

In a flashback, we see Dana’s character, a single mother named Hughette, abandoned by her fiancé at a gas station while making their way to meet her parents in the country. She is forced to take a ride from a peculiar stranger, played by celebrated French actor Dominique Pinon (Amélie, Delicatessen), and then asks him to assume the role of her fiancé, so as not to disappoint her mother.

Ralitzer has ties to both Hughette (a fan) and the stranger, who may be her ghostwriter, creating a question about who has been killed and why. The identity confusion is furthered when we learn that the stranger could be an escaped pedophile on the loose, or the husband of a woman searching for a missing school teacher, and that Ralitzer may not actually use a ghost writer. Oh, and Hughette may be a prostitute and/or she may be falling in love with the stranger.

So, the question becomes who is who, who is real and who is in danger?

One of Saint Paul’s most popular outdoor film series starts again this summer at the Central Library. The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library sponsors the page-to-screen themed series, which runs June 20 to July 25. The showings begin on June 20 with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.

The series continues with a screening of the blockbuster classic Jaws on June 27. The superhero comedy Mystery Men will be screened on June 11. On July 18, visitors will see the 1996 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Sir Ben Kingsley. The series closes July 25 with a screening of The Living Daylights, with Timothy Dalton in his first outing as James Bond.

All showings are free and open to the public. The movies start at dusk on the lawn of the Kellogg Boulevard Courtyard. The films will be cancelled in case of rain. Visit the Friends website or call 651-222-3242 for more information.

Stone has always struck me as a latter-day Gladys
Knight, a lady who sings like she knows her way around the church and the
high-rise and the rural South, who’s comfortable to a fault with conservative
soul trappings, not realizing that her best moments come when she steps beyond
the mix and indulges her supple voice and emotional credibility in seemingly
spontaneous testimony. Having endured enough of a career trough to suffer the
indignity of appearing on Celebrity Fit
Club a while back, Stone’s fourth and latest disc, The Art of Love & War on the
reconstituted Stax label, is not her best (I’d opt for Mahogany Soul), but of a self-assured
piece with her previous output. There are echoes of Stevie Wonder ("My People"),
her stint in the Soul II Soul spinoff Perfect World ("Go Back To Your Life"),
Philly soul ("Here We Go Again"), and slow jam romance ("Pop Pop"). Some of them are sure to be mixed in the
Stone favorites like Raphael Saadiq’s "Brotha" and the shimmering "No More Rain
(In This Cloud)" — which borrows a groove and sense of romantic-spiritual uplift
from Knight’s bag of tricks. It all adds up to R&B-pop with a dash of hip
hop that cuts a little deeper than neo-soul.

People struggle to survive in the midst of crisis. Is hatred stronger
than love? What horrors are we capable of when our survival is at
stake? And what happens to the survival instinct when you no longer
have a reason to live? The Playwrights’ Center presents Euphoria, a new
play by University of Minnesota student Keith Hovis. Directed by 2007
BA graduate Jenna Papke, the play is an intense exploration of the dark
things people are capable of in dark times.