“Just because I’m coming from a human-rights perspective doesn’t mean we don’t have fun in concert.” So says Leyla McCalla (her first name is pronounced like the Derek and the Dominos title song from their 1970 mega-hit double album “Layla.”) This Leyla and her band play the main stage at Avalon Theatre Saturday night.

While “Layla” and its “Other Assorted Love Songs” were short on issues of social justice, Leyla McCalla, born in New York to Haitian immigrant parents and an American citizen by birthright, is immersed in her heritage and Haiti’s historic struggle with democracy and basic survival from one catastrophe after another.

“Haiti’s always seemed like this faraway place,” McCalla says, “but we’re far more connected as Americans than we realize. Haiti was the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Its very existence,” she says, “is and remains a threat to colonial power.” (Slavery was abolished in Haiti decades before Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War Emancipation Proclamation.) “When we talk about ‘Black Lives Matter,’ Haiti is a huge part of that.” 

The largest population of Haitian immigrants in Maryland is located in Salisbury, with more than 2,300, doubling the population of Haitians living in Baltimore. Most are drawn to Salisbury for work in the poultry industry. About 200 or so live in the Mid-Shore area triangle of Easton, Cambridge, and Federalsburg. “About 20 percent of our clients are Haitian immigrants,” says Matthew Peters, executive director of the Easton-based Chesapeake Multicultural Resource Center. 

Earthquakes, hurricanes, attendant floods, plus the 30-year Duvalier dictatorship following an American occupation of Haiti, left the country bereft of leadership. It culminated in the 2021 assassination of its democratically elected president, Jovenel Moise. 

In 1995, at age 10, McCalla spent months visiting her grandmother in Haiti, exploring her roots and learning first-hand about the nation’s daunting challenges. She cannot visit Haiti now because it is ungovernable, ruled by gangs who raise “taxes” by kidnapping people of means and holding them hostage for ransom.

A multi-disciplinary arts project commissioned by Duke University based on Radio Haiti archives it acquired inspired McCalla’s most recent album, “Breaking the Thermometer,” released in 2022. The title is a recognition of the demise of a free press, or in this case, a free voice of a radio network spreading the truth across Haiti. 

The comparison of lost democracy in Haiti and the threat of authoritarianism overtaking American one-person/one-vote is hardly lost on McCalla. Her latest project is a four-song cycle called “Freedom Series,” of which two songs have been released so far.  

But while the concert on Saturday will call attention to injustice, it will not be a gospel or political sermon. Leyla McCalla and her band – drummer Shawn Myers, bassist Pete Olynciw, and guitarist Nhum Zdybel – know how to make “a big and joyous sound,” says McCalla. Check her out on YouTube, especially her banjo and vocal riffs with the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops on a foot-stomping number called “Cornbread and Butterbeans.” 

I don’t know if that song is on her playlist, but it’s a good-time, makin’-love celebration of just being alive, which is itself a fundamental human right.

Leyla McCalla and Band in Concert
8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23, Avalon Theatre, 40 E. Dover St., Easton; avalonfoundation.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

For a decade, beginning in 2010, the Monty Alexander Jazz Festival was the centerpiece of the Avalon Foundation’s Labor Day weekend celebration, after which fashion custom decreed it no longer suitable to wear white in public. But since the festival played its last notes before the Monday holiday, it was OK for Alexander to take the stage wearing a white tuxedo jacket.

In 2021, Alexander ended his 10-year summer’s-end run in Easton. But the host team picked up the baton with the 2022 Avalon Jazz Experience, headlined by Marcus Roberts’ Modern Jazz Generation. The second Jazz Experience festival opens Friday night, Sept. 1, on the Avalon’s main stage with Sammy Miller and the Congregation, followed on Saturday night by a return engagement of Dominick Farinacci & Friends and Allan Harris in a Sunday matinee.

Sammy Miller and his seven-piece band have toured the world, more or less, with highlight stops at the jazz festivals at Monterey and Newport, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, the White House, and, before the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Vladimir Putin, the Prokofiev Concert Hall in Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Trumpeter Farinacci, another globetrotter who’s played in Japan, Qatar, and the Eastern Shore – having opened the inaugural Jazz Experience festival last September – brings his Triad ensemble of pianist Jonathan Thomas, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Jerome Jennings to the Avalon along with vocalist Ekep Nkwelle and flamenco dancer Alice Blumenfeld for a multifaceted program ranging from jazz standards to improvisational riffs.

The festival finale shines the spotlight on versatile Brooklyn-born, Harlem-based guitarist/vocalist/bandleader/composer Harris, whose unique interpretation of the Great American Songbook has drawn comparisons to Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole. Contemporary jazz, including Harris originals from his “Kate’s Soulfood” album, add a finishing touch to this wide-ranging Jazz Experience playlist. avalonfoundation.org

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For a theatrical cabaret experience, Centre Stage presents the 2014 Broadway musical “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” which captures the demons and dramatic allure of Baltimore native Billie Holiday months before her 1959 death. Her songs accompanied on piano – among them “God Bless the Child” and the lynch-protest anthem “Strange Fruit” – are, of course, integral to the show, running Sept. 14 to Oct. 8. But her life story, spilling out between numbers, slurring into intoxicated incoherence, reveal a subtext even more compelling than the dark lyrics. The play marks the directorial debut of Pulitzer-nominated actress/author Nikkole Salter.
centrestage.org

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An unprecedented National Gallery of Art group exhibition opening Sept. 22 along the Mall in D.C. features works by 50 living Native American artists across the United States. In mediums ranging from painting to performance art, from sculpture to sketches and beadwork to weaving, as well as video and film, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” presents a collective visualization of indigenous reverence for and connection to land they inhabit or once inhabited.

Curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an artist, and citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, the show, running through Jan. 15 in the National Gallery’s East Building, reflects thousands of years of spiritual concern for tribal land bases that have been invaded and annexed through serial treaty abrogations. The Flathead Indian Reservation, for instance, was home to three tribes in Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia, of which more than half a million acres slipped from their grasp through land re-allotments that began in 1904. The exhibit’s artistic statement calls for justice and recognition.
nga.gov

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Meanwhile, an installation of indigenous art by Dakota-based Ogala-Sioux Marty Two Bulls Jr. puts a new face on Easton’s Academy Art Museum’s Atrium entranceway gallery, where “Hoesy Corona: Terrestrial Caravan” has been making its climate-change statement for a year.

Using the buffalo as a metaphor for overconsumption resulting in near-extinction, the artist critiques a culture that would lay waste to such iconic and powerful creatures. “Marty Two Bulls Jr.: Dominion” is an imagery wasteland of paper cutouts, soda cans, and assorted non-recyclables reflecting a disconnection from nature and a disregard for ancestral economy and wisdom. The installation opens on Sept. 15 and runs through next August. academyartmusuem.org
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The Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, led by Grammy winner Michael Repper, launches its 2023-24 subscription season of Masterworks concerts featuring Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and living American composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery.

The season-opening concert, 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 28, at Easton Church of God, introduces “Strum,” a song for string orchestra or chamber configurations by Montgomery, resident composer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, whose “Soul Force” was among the recordings by African-American women on New York Youth Symphony Orchestra’s album that won the best-orchestral Grammy for the young musicians and music director Repper. Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” follows on the program, anchored by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. The three-concert series continues at beach venues: Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes, Delaware, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, and 3 p.m. Oct. 1, Community Church, Ocean Pines.

Here is your chance to welcome autumn with a classical and contemporary salutation.
midatlanticsymphony.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

 

Judging from her fond recollections, Avra Sullivan, executive director and co-founder of the Shore Shakespeare Company, comes by her passion for the Bard genetically. “My parents read me Shakespeare as bedtime stories,” she said with a laugh, “but they may have thought Hamlet is a little rough for a 7-year-old.”

 

Opening on Labor Day weekend at Adkins Arboretum – where Shore Shakespeare got its start a decade ago – Sullivan directs Much Ado About Nothing, which moves on to Oxford Community Center’s backyard the following weekend and Chestertown’s Wilmer Park, Sept. 15-17. 

 

After being introduced to Shakespeare at such a young age and subsequently earning her high-school diploma, Sullivan met Chris Rogers, a fellow Shakespeare devotee, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where she was a Wilkes University theater/dance major. Post-college, they joined a Shakespearean troupe near Atlantic City. But after moving back home to her native Chestertown, Sullivan missed the experience of performing Shakespeare live and, together with Rogers, pursued their shared ambition to offer Shakespeare in the “way it was performed in his time,” Sullivan said – excluding the Elizabethan ban on women performing on stage. Their goal was and remains to present free open-air shows (with pay-what-you-wish or suggested-donation options) played on austere sets framing players in character costumes but not especially elaborate.

 

Their vision was realized in 2013 at Adkins Arboretum near Ridgely, where the inaugural Shore Shakespeare production, Twelfth Night, drew an audience of 300 who brought their own lawn chairs or beach blankets seating. A second performance in Chestertown followed.

 

The new company returned the following year with the ultimate romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Successive summers featured Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It. In 2019, Shore Shakespeare moved indoors to Chestertown’s Garfield Center for a February staging of Don Nigro’s spoof, The Curate’s ‘As You Like It’ (lawn chairs unnecessary). 

 

Two tragic events – COVID-19 and the sudden and unexpected death by heart attack of co-founder Chris Rogers – wiped out plans for any performances. In 2021, though COVID still prevented most indoor performing arts – Shore Shakespeare recovered by presenting A Little Touch of Shakespeare on the Theme of Love, a collage of seven snippets put together by Rogers and performed as a tribute to him in Centreville’s Wharf Park. A full production of Measure for Measure, directed by company choreographer and actor Greg Miniahan, was last summer’s Shore Shakespeare offering. 

 

Much Ado About Nothing ostensibly centers on the courtship of Hero and her suitor Claudio. But they are upstaged by the witty repartee of Hero’s cousin Beatrice (played by Christine Kinlock) and Claudio’s friend Benedick (played by Howard Messick, a Shore Shakespearean from the company’s inception).

 

But besides live summer performances, while the most public face of Shore Shakespeare, there’s much more to its mission. “We do a ton of educational outreach,” Sullivan says, citing her team’s status as artists-in-residence for Caroline County schools – principally North Caroline High in Denton and Colonel Richardson near Federalsburg. “We do workshop classes on acting and stagecraft,” Sullivan says, adding that five students from the spring semester are in the cast of Much Ado.

 

When asked about the biggest challenge for Shore Shakespeare, Sullivan has a quick answer. “Weather. It’s not just performances that get rained out. So do our rehearsals. We’re an outdoor company, all right.”

 

As for Shore Shakespeare’s repertoire of plays over its 10-year history, only two have been tragedies. Hamlet was not one of them. After all, “to be or not to be” was out of the question as a young child’s bedtime story.

 

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

Shore Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

 

Adkins Arboretum: Sept. 2 at 2 p.m. and Sept. 3 at 3 p.m.

Oxford Community Center: Sept. 8 at 7 p.m., Sept. 9 at 6 p.m. & Sept. 10 at 3 p.m.

Wilmer Park: Sept.15 at 7 p.m., Sept. 16 at 6 p.m. & Sept. 17 at 3 p.m.

 

http://www.shoreshakespeare.org

 

As part of its Music for Maryland summer tour, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra returned Saturday night to the Todd Performing Arts Center at Chesapeake College for the first time since 2016 – an absence due in part to the COVID pandemic that shut down the concert hall.

An appreciative audience of more than 400 welcomed the orchestra led by guest conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, who, after taking a bow, turned on the podium to direct the musicians in Dvorak’s rousing Slavonic Dance, Opus 72, No. 7 in C major. This spirited seventh tune in his series, inspired by a Serbian folk tale, was an instant hit when it was arranged for full orchestra in 1887. It was easy to imagine why with the joyfully rhythmic performance by the BSO, dressed in summer white jackets and blouses.

Turning to introduce the next in the series of short dance numbers, the gregarious conductor, a native of Canada, told the story of Florence Price, the first African-American woman composer to have her music performed by a major U.S. orchestra. Her prodigious works were thought to be lost until discovered in a home near Chicago long after Price’s death in 1953. Her posthumous renaissance was celebrated Saturday night with “Juba Dance,” the third movement of Price’s ground-breaking Symphony No. 1, which made its debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. The jazzy Juba movement takes its name from foot-stomping, hand-clapping dances performed by Southern plantation slaves. The BSO string section set a vibrant pace with bass and drum beats marking time in percussive syncopation.

Two distinctly different waltzes followed, starting with Tchaikovsky’s traditional one from the opera “Eugene Onegin.” Fittingly romantic with the undercurrent of love’s unrequited intrigue, the heartbreaking string-led melody closes with a torrid finish. The thoroughly modern waltz movement of “Four Dances” by Towson University music professor and composer Jonathan Leshner “sounds very expensive in its elegance,” Bartholomew-Poyser noted of the jazz undertones that switch to robust outbursts before settling on a stylish minuet in conclusion. Bartok’s even more variant Romanian Folk Dances followed with seven rapid-fire mini-movements – from tenderly emotive to urgently impatient to an even faster pace as if played by Transylvania fiddlers in a race to finish.

The aptly named “Polyphonic Lively” borrows its title from a painting by Paul Klee. Written in 2016 by Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne, who says that his piece – indeed lively – “conjures up high-vibration, high-intensity chatter,” expressed in sharp turns in orchestral “voices” that stretch a melodic throughline with instrumental touches and flourishes in disparate brief solos.
Far more familiar to most of us is Piazzolla’s 1965 “Summer” entry in “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” his answer to Vivaldi’s Northern Hemisphere “Four Seasons,” changing the order from that of the 18th-century Venetian-Viennese composer. Each Piazzolla “season” is written as quite different compositions rather than an all-encompassing suite. Chelsea Kim, BSO’s first violin, performed the extensive solo portion of this longest piece in the concert. The light accompaniment by the full orchestra grows more heated as if responding to the rising temperature of January in Buenos Aires. Kim’s expressive interpretation of the season’s variable moods – from restfully languid to breakouts of thunderous claps – on this evening echoed the thunderstorm that had just pierced the clammy humidity of the day.

The unpronounceable “Im Krapfenwald’l,” which translates roughly as the “Cuckoo Polka,” by Johann Strauss Jr., offered musical comic relief as birdsong chirps of the string section suggested a Viennese Woods setting. What begins as a standard polka concludes with
a bombastic surprise that scares the cuckoos from their perches.
Bartholomew-Poyser described the concert finale, the fourth and last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, as “something like a perpetual motion machine.” In keeping with the dance idioms of the concert format, Beethoven’s thrilling finish to his masterpiece offers a whirl of dance-like energy, as reflected in a young boy in the front row who mimicked the conductor’s high-energy exhortations to his team of musicians. Besides the splendid and inspired performance that earned its standing ovation, the miracle of it all is that Beethoven’s 7th premiered in December 1813 when he was all but deaf.

An encore medley that included a Sousa march closed out the evening of highly varied and highly skilled performances of new and/or unfamiliar works, along with beloved classics. After two more concerts on this Music for Maryland tour, the BSO prepares for its 2023-24 season with its new music director, Jonathon Heyward.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.

MUSIC FOR MARYLAND BSO TOUR

Saturday night at Todd Performing Arts Performing Arts Center, Chesapeake College, Wye Mills. Remaining concerts on tour are at 3 p.m. Aug. 5, Dodge Performing Arts Center, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, and 4 p.m. Aug. 6, Garrett College Performing Arts Center, McHenry; bsomusic.org/calendar

As July gives way to August, the Academy Art Museum turns the page on most of its gallery space with three new exhibits, including one by its 2023 artist-in-residence and a triplicate exhibit tracing the influences on three 19th-to-20th century European masters who, in turn, changed the spatial perspective of the next generations of painters to pave the way to Modernism, Cubism, and Post-Expressionism. The third new show mocks contemporary notions of luxury, high fashion, and interior design with an abstract sensibility.

“Spatial Reckoning” features pioneering works in the evolving careers of classically schooled artists from France (Jacques Villon, 1875-1963), Italy (Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964), and Spain (Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973). Each was inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne, who turned early from Romanticism and, looking past 19th-century Impressionists, pointed toward a new way of seeing and then painting it that way.

Morandi painted still lifes throughout his career, depicting household bottles and vases, landscapes, and occasional figurative portraits. His style progressed gradually toward more subtle coloration, with objects emerging from a haze. At first, a devotee of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Villon tilted toward Fauvism and Cubism at the turn of the century, creating multiple perspectives on the same flat plane. At the same time, Picasso sought to evoke an emotional response to his novel artistic liberties with what might have been representational paintings in other hands. “Spatial Reckoning” opens Aug. 1 with artworks on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and other collections.

First up among the three new AAM exhibits is Baltimore-based Amy Boone-McCreesh’s “Visual Currency” on July 28, with an Aug. 3 reception for each show. Working in sculpture, collage, and mixed media, McCreesh presents visual critiques of arbitrarily shifting tastes that rule high-end adornment, decoration, and fashion while speculating on what might lay in store for what could be considered posh in future abundance.

AAM’s 2023 artist-in-residence Laura Letinsky, a native of Canada now living in Chicago, is a still-life photographer who specializes in layering effects of human presence in the scenes she captures. A Guggenheim Fellow whose art comments on the role of women in domestic settings while questioning their context. Letinsky’s art is held in the collections of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty and Guggenheim museums, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. As part of her residency, Letinsky will present an August masterclass on how the camera can shape a greater understanding of the world.
academyartmuseum.org
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If you’re suffering from writers/actors strike withdrawal – or even if you aren’t – you might enjoy seeing and hearing the Emmy and Writer’s Guild award-winning wordsmith, comedian, and host of the HBO show “Last Week with John Oliver.”  Now on forced hiatus from his weekly gig, Oliver gets a chance to return to his roots as a touring stand-up comic. He comes to Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre in the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center for one show only at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 2. From 2006 to 2013, Oliver made his TV mark as a correspondent on another multi-award-winner, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” guest-hosting for a long stretch near the end of its run.

If you miss the Hippodrome show or prefer to see him with another prime-time talk host, you can catch Oliver with the host of “The Late Show with Seth Meyers,” also sidelined by the strikes. Oliver and Meyers appear together in three shows at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan, Aug. 17-19.
france-merrickpac.com, msg.com/beacon-theatre

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Following the lead of Plein Air Easton, which just completed its 19th annual festival, Artists Paint OC: Plein Air 2023 opens on Aug. 9 as artists spread out along the Boardwalk, streets, harbors, the bay, and its marshes and, of course, the ocean beach to paint in the open sea air starting at 9 a.m. until whenever. Fifty invited artists will continue painting scenes all over Ocean City and Assateague Island until Aug. 12, when they show their works at a free reception for the Wet Paint Show & Sale, 5-7 p.m. at the OC Performing Arts Center. You can enjoy live music, hors d’oeuvres, and a cash bar while you peruse the paintings and maybe take one home (don’t forget your credit card). Artists Paint OC winds up Saturday morning, Aug. 13, with a quick-draw paint along the Boardwalk near Division Street, plus a Kids Paint OC Art Show at a closing reception, 1-3 p.m.
artleagueofoceancity.org
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The Mainstay in Rock Hall brings the classic rock sounds of the Blake Thompson Band to its backyard stage – weather permitting – as July starts to make way for August at 6:30 on the evening of Sunday, the 30th. A Kent County native, Thompson’s musical taste ranges from classic rock and pop to blues, soul, and R&B, having toured with Little Feat, David Crosby, and the namesake bands of Steve Miller and Dave Matthews. Best known for his electric guitar chops, Thompson counts Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Alvin Lee among his heroes. Together with his wife, singer/songwriter, and violinist Kate Russo, the pair mixes in original songs of their own. 
mainstayrockhall.org 
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The Chicks, a dozen-time Grammy-winning trio – most of whose awards came when they were known as the Dixie Chicks – bring their 2023 world tour to Columbia’s Merriweather Post Pavilion at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 2. Joining them on the Maryland tour stop is the Canadian band, Wild Rivers. On June 25, 2020, in response to the Black Lives Matters movement and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, the Dixie Chicks changed their name following criticism that “Dixie” bore connotations of American slavery. In July that year, the Chicks released “Gaslighter,” their first album in 14 years. A month later, they performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which nominated now-president Joe Biden.
merriweatherpostpavilion.com

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts editor and writer now living in Easton.