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Newport To Allow Greater Flexibility For Nye Beach Development (Newport News-Times)
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OSU Gets $1 Million For Whale Research (Corvallis Gazette-Times)
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Depoe Bay Renews City Commission Committee Positions (Newport News-Times)
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Newport Oregon Jazz -
Musician Wows Them At Jazz At Newport, Oregon
There aren't many other clarinetists in jazz; it would be a stretch to
find a dozen," Ken Peplowski said after leaving an audience of nearly 200
virtually breathless at the Jazz Festival in Newport, Oregon.
Peplowski,
who has played in, among other groups, Benny Goodman's last band, proved an
equally accomplished sax player. Unlike most of the other horn players who also
play clarinet, he explained, he began on clarinet and then learned the
saxophone, making the clarinet his first instrument, chronologically and perhaps
in preference. But it's a difficult love: the clarinet, he said, is "a much less
forgiving instrument, you have to constantly take care of it."
It was
the combination of gorgeousness and rarity that made his clarinet playing the
stand-out of the evening.
"I started playing it in a Polish polka band,"
he said, "and I played lots of Klezmer music." (Klezmer was the music of the
East European Jewish ghettos, revived in recent decades by urban Jewish
musicians). "That's where I learned to improvise," he said - and the music
Saturday night, he added, "was 90 percent improvisation."
There wasn't
much Klezmer in there, but there was more than the occasional feeling of swing
throughout the hour-and-a-quarter-long set at the Shilo Inn. Yet the music
wasn't swing, either - actually, there isn't a genre name for the current modern
jazz played by Peplowski and the rest of the members of the band he and
guitarist Dan Faehnle fronted.
"Smooth" certainly fit a great deal of the
music the group played Saturday night; smooth, the way Irish Crme Whisky or
fine wine is smooth. There were numerous song segments where the Peplowski's
clarinet - or his saxophone- flowed like an Oregon mountain stream. And Faehnle
on guitar, Mike Wofford on piano, Andre St. James on bass, and Portland's own
Mel Brown on drums also often reminded one of the hurrying and slowing of just
such a stream. Listeners could imagine it speeding up over rocks and cobbles,
slipping down foot-high falls, and dallying in eddies before flowing swiftly
through close-walled rapids - all the time reflecting in swirls the greens of
the foliage, the purple and brown of the rocks, the yellow of the lichen, the
blue of the sky.
At one point, it seemed Peplowski had picked up a flute
and begun to play it, the notes were so sweet. But no, he said later, that was
not a flute, it was the clarinet.
And an extended cover of Brazilian
Bossa Nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Trieste" was as smooth and flowing
as anything one could ask for, with a Latin rhythm and even lighter touch than
the other songs.
Yet there is always a danger this approach to jazz will
deteriorate into New-Age, Kenny G or other going-to-sleep music. (Not that this
music isn't lovely, it is; but it isn't jazz.) And, indeed, after completing the
Jobim song, the band moved on to other, more up-tempo things.
At several
places, he and the rest of the band picked up the beat, and played rollickingly
fast music - licks flying back and forth between sax or clarinet and the clear
and precise-as-porcelain guitar, between the drums and bass, and between
Wofford's exciting piano and everything. This was music at a pace Benny Goodman
didn't dare shoot for; the times weren't ready for it then. The crowd at the
Shilo, of course, took it all in stride; this - plus the smooth, soft music, the
international flavor, the other jazz history references - is what today's jazz
is about. Eclectic.
A couple of times, Peplowski's sax playing touched
upon the more difficult, higher-register reaches that, in decades past, became
the take-off point for the raucous, atonal excursions by sax greats like John
Coltrane and Archie Shepp; excursions that became, in the end, part of the
problem, an unlistenable jazz that lost ground to R & B, soul, rock 'n'
roll, and later funk, hip-hop and rap. But Peplowski never went over that line;
he honked his respects to those past greats, wailed briefly with their passions
(though not their anger), and moved on to more melodious things.
Of all
the influences that wove their way through the concert Saturday night, none
stood out clearer than that of Charlie Parker. It's commonplace for a
saxophonist to say he was influenced by Bird. Who in that business is not? But
why not? And so the bouncy, rapid-fire signature line from Parker's famous tune
"Salt Peanuts" showed up clearly, if slightly morphed, at a couple points. It
was clear Peplowski enjoys throwing in that riff.
Probably only the older
members of the audience caught it. When asked how jazz can be kept alive, after
having been overshadowed by other music, Peplowski explained it was not just the
rise of other music forms or the diversion into screech-honk which moved jazz
towards the margin of mass cultural consciousness. In the 1990s, he said, Blue
Note, Verve (two of the historic jazz labels) and more recent entrants like Sony
started bankrolling artists by paying to bring audiences into jazz clubs "to
make it look good." But he continued, "then the accountants saw the companies
were losing millions, and they slashed it. Now the recoding companies are all
looking for the next Nora Jones," and unwilling to take a chance on music that
might set new directions and perhaps regain a huge audience for one of America's
greatest cultural creations.
Still, Peplowski says, there is hope. On the
one hand, the Internet is furthering the fracturing of mass-taste, with
narrow-casting and personal electronics, and could introduce millions to jazz.
On the other hand, if people get tired of hearing the same mediocre music, the
same old same old, they might go searching for something else, he pointed
out.
In the meanwhile, jazz is alive and well in Newport. The Jazz
Festival brought the music to the Oregon coast, and people from around the coast
and across the Willamette Valley (and a few points further east) came out to
hear the real thing this past weekend.
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A Rail In The Making (Corvallis Gazette-Times)
Editorâs note: Morris and Lynn Walker are working to make â150 Years in the Heart of the Valley,â a documentary film about Corvallisâ first 150 years. Each Saturday, they...
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Oregon Chautauqua Program Spotlights Abraham Lincoln (Newport News-Times)
The American Association of University Women (AAUW) will host a free Oregon Chautauqua program at 7 p.m. today (Wednesday) at the Congregational Church, 1760 NW 25th St. in Lincoln City.
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