enciclopediadelrockmexicano.com

By LARRY BLUMENFELD

New York

At Columbia University’s Miller Theater on Feb. 25, Don Byron gripped his clarinet in between songs. “We need to talk about Thomas Dorsey,” he said, referring to the pianist and composer acknowledged as the father of African-American gospel music. “Dorsey is literally the guy who took the nastiest blues you could play and put it together with religious music,” he told the audience. “The dominance of gospel blues in African-American tradition was not a given back then. One person had that idea.”

Leading his New Gospel Quintet, Mr. Byron celebrates the enduring power and surprising range of Dorsey’s idea. As on his new CD, “Love, Peace, and Soul” (Savoy Jazz), in concert his group also occasionally imbued that idea with the elements and feel of modern jazz. Drummer Pheeroan akLaff’s rhythmic innovations were decidedly subtle and spare, the tambourine affixed to his drum kit’s hi-hat occasionally invoking a tent revival. Pianist Xavier Davis delved deeply into stride piano during “It’s My Desire,” elsewhere moving in complex lockstep with bassist Brad Jones. Guitarist Brandon Ross, a special guest on both the concert program and the recording, turned Eddie Harris’s “Sham Time”—which isn’t gospel but fit the mood—into something explosive and abstract. Carla Cook’s vocals moved from churchlike reverence to fevered blues (on the CD, DK Dyson veers more toward rock inflection). Dean Bowman, another guest, sang the personalized pleas of Dorsey’s “Consideration” with plain-spoken directness.

Dorsey’s songs are meant for singers, yet Mr. Byron carried the music’s message with the greatest force. Sometimes it came via his tenor saxophone, as through his knowing counterpoint on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” But it arrived mostly and best via his clarinet, as in wonderfully biting dissonance on the refrain of “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” and with disarming tenderness and stunning technique on “When I’ve Done My Best.” Mr. Byron made his point as composer too, with one stately original, “Himmm.”

Mr. Byron’s music often comes with a lesson, typically focused on subversive elements, forgotten heroes and subtexts of social commentary. His brilliant 1996 album, “Bug Music,” enlivened the notion of repertory jazz while exalting the music of Raymond Scott and John Kirby, two bandleaders who straddled the worlds of jazz and classical music in the 1930s. In the liner notes to his 1993 CD dedicated to the klezmer music of Mickey Katz, Mr. Byron argued for Katz as “one of the most important artists America has produced.” His record debut, 1992′s “Tuskegee Experiments,” featured compositions by both Duke Ellington and Robert Schumann, along with original pieces that defied genre classification. If there is one through-line to his career thus far, it is confounded expectations.

“People are always trying to figure out what I really am,” Mr. Byron said in an interview. “What I am is someone who can do anything he puts his mind to. I believe in that. I prepared for that.”

Mr. Byron is a clarinetist of uncommon range and skill, a self-confessed “music nerd” whose rigor is often concealed by his easeful swing. While growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., he was exposed to a variety of music by his father, a postal worker who played bass in calypso bands, and his mother, a phone-company employee who played classical piano. He studied classical music in high school and attended the New England Conservatory, where he apprenticed with Third-Stream originator George Russell and played a prominent role in Hankus Netsky’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.

On a 2004 CD, “Ivey-Divey,” Mr. Byron found inspiration in saxophonist Lester Young’s 1946 recording with a bass-free trio of pianist Nat Cole and drummer Buddy Rich. It’s not Young’s most celebrated work, but for Mr. Byron it showcased Young’s ability to create coherent structure from improvisation that sounded offhand. With “Love, Peace, and Soul,” Mr. Byron considers the deeper dichotomy embodied in the life and work of Dorsey, who is best known for “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” but also composed the raunchy blues number “It’s Tight Like That.” Before devoting his energies to religious music and prior to his work with Mahalia Jackson, Dorsey was known as “Georgia Tom,” performing with Ma Rainey and her Wild Cats.

“Not only was he a great songwriter,” Mr. Byron said, “but his incorporation of blues into 20th-century worship music was revolutionary. A lot of things in American culture flow from that move.” Mr. Byron found a rewarding trove from which to work. “The sheet music is impressive in the way that old Gershwin sheet music is impressive,” he said. “You could actually learn the style from reading it. All the harmonic moves that we know as gospel are in there, everything James Cleveland and Aretha Franklin played on piano.”

For Mr. Byron, who is 53, this gospel project isn’t just his latest musical investigation. More than a decade ago, when his mother was dying and he was facing middle age, he found himself hanging on the words of ministers, hearing the music in their delivery. “I needed something,” he said. He began listening to gospel music, and especially to Kirk Franklin. “I could look at the elements, figure out all the fancy chords that Franklin used that made me respect him as a musician, but there was something beyond that. That I could feel the greatness of God through a piece of music—that’s really personal. It just hit me like a ton of bricks.”

So is this new project a direct offering of faith? Mr. Byron closed his eyes, thought for a moment. “Yeah, sure. There’s some Jesus up in there.”

Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Celebrating the Union of Raunch and Religion.

The Chocolate Chips

A Smokin’ Notion

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Chocolate chips from Autumn Martin’s Hot Cakes

There’s a nuanced flavor running through Autumn Martin’s s’mores cookies. Is that bacon? Not quite. In order to replicate the char of marshmallows roasted over a campfire, the Seattle-based pastry pro smokes chocolate chips with alder wood and adds them to her batter. The former overseer of Theo Chocolate’s kitchen has been mastering this maneuver for the past five years. Now, with her new company, Hot Cakes—purveyor of decadent jarred desserts, over-the-top salted caramels and cookies—she has found other ways to apply the technique. Ms. Martin sells the chips separately so that adventurous sweet-crafters can experiment at will. Suggested applications include incorporating the smoky nibs into a ganache, which can then be blended into a Scotch milkshake, grinding them into savory meat rubs, using them for a mousse or simply melting them into a drizzle-on for buttered toast. $9 for three cookies, $14 per 8-ounce bag of chips, getyourhotcakes.com

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

‘Culinary Intelligence’ by Peter Kaminsky

The Diet Guide

Healthy Appetite

Writer Peter Kaminsky has lived off the fat of the land as a reviewer of untapped New York ethnic eateries, while also journeying through France with Daniel Boulud and researching his tome on the gastronomic majesty of swine. The embarrassment of richness caught up with him, and his doctor advised that he lose some serious poundage. His newest book, “Culinary Intelligence,” proves that a delicious bite can be had at any price point or calorie count. Mr. Kaminsky avoids restricting readers to a collection of recipes (although there are 14 stellar essentials at the book’s closing) or stringent meal plans. Maximizing your FPC (flavors per calorie) is the linchpin, and Mr. Kaminsky has it down to a science. His edifying manifesto allows for both well-being and hedonism to “coexist quite happily.” $25, knopfdoubleday.com

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Santé for persnickety snackers

The Snacks

Nuts, to You

Roasted and seasoned in small batches, serious nut-jobber Santé has enough of a selection of thoughtfully crafted flavors (from cardamom cashews to chipotle almonds) to sate the most persnickety snackers or spruce up just about any dish. Candied pistachios belong in brittle or atop rice pudding, while the aforementioned savory options (as well as garlic almonds) can provide salads with some zing. The California company is careful never to overpower the main ingredient; added spices or accents only enhance the nut. $2 per 1-ounce bag,
santenuts.com

—Charlotte Druckman

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page D9 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: No Headline Available.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

NYC-22

Begins Sunday at 10 p.m. on CBS

“NYC-22,” a police drama, and “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” a documentary on a woman who claimed falsely to have been a 9/11 victim—two outstanding shows coming up this week—don’t have anything in common other than their Manhattan settings. That is, other than their capacity to keep audiences transfixed, eyes glued to the screen, which both have in abundance.

“NYC-22,” created by novelist Richard Price, shows its colors at once. There should be nothing instantly enchanting in a saga about six rookie police officers assembling for their first day’s duty in their Harlem precinct, facing cold stares of veteran cops. They stumble around the clutter of the locker room looking for a place to store their clothes, which only earns them dark looks from the veteran officers and warnings to stay away from their things. Still it’s clear almost as soon as the young police officers hit the streets in pairs, as they begin talking to one another in language and in tones recognizable as those in which people actually speak to one another—a rare commodity in television dramas about police or anyone else—that the enchantment process has begun.

It proceeds apace as talk ends and the action begins—danger erupts suddenly for the new officers, attached to a unit focused on gangs, though they’re thrown into battle against crime of all kinds: extortion, bank robbery, domestic violence. It’s breathtaking action without a single car chase, and reflective, as so much else in this series is, of Mr. Price’s writerly eye for detail, or more precisely, reality. There is, here, none of the clamorous effort at authenticity—the noise, the profanity, the emphasis on extremes—that deadens so many urban police dramas.

There is, rather, a credible sense of life as it is lived by normal people—no small achievement for a drama packed wall to wall with extraordinary tests of courage, near calamities, and hair-raising terrors that are part of the daily lives and work of these characters, police officers. The setting—a gentrifying Harlem with fine new apartment buildings, along with the tenements and the youth gangs—is no less credible.

The young officers struggling to make good in their new roles all have their reasons for coming to this work and for the passion that drives them to succeed. The one nicknamed Lazarus (Adam Goldberg), visibly older than most rookies, joined the force after losing his job as a journalist on the crime beat. He’s a complicated man with problems—a kind Mr. Goldberg knows how to portray. Lazarus’s police colleagues are all, like him, distinctively drawn characters, particularly the slender blond beauty, Jennifer (Leelee Sobieski), a former Marine MP who served in Iraq. Watch her calm a troublesome gang member with one swift and terrorizing arm grip.

There’s terror to go around in episode one, written by Mr. Price, a tour de force that finds two of the new officers in the midst of a brutal gang battle—a spectacular scene—and two others trapped in a domestic disturbance heart-stopping in its menace. Another two are assigned to the problem of a clogged toilet. It is, in its artfulness and drama, a smashing pilot and—from the evidence of the next episodes—a reliable indicator of the quality to come.

* * *

The Woman Who Wasn’t There


Tuesday, April 17, at 8:00 p.m. on Investigation Discovery

There’s nothing artful about “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” a story all the bleaker for being true. The bleakness of this saga of the woman calling herself Tania Head, who became one of the most conspicuous exemplars of survivor heroism and fortitude, makes it, of course, no less fascinating.

She had, other survivors believed, endured inconceivable horrors. As one tells the filmmaker, “Her suffering was head and shoulders above anything any of us could have imagined.” She’d crawled, by her own testimony, over body parts and debris to escape from the South Tower’s 78th floor. She’d flown through the air, felt the pain as she hit a marble wall. “I was smelling my own skin burning.” There was more, much more. Her right arm had nearly been severed by the impact of the second plane—and still, other survivors marveled, she’d had the will to lead, to comfort and advise others. Even to assure one of them that, yes, he had suffered far less—but that was no reason to feel he didn’t merit the attention due a survivor. She became the president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, a heroine photographed endlessly in the embrace of admiring city and state leaders, her picture splashed in the paper. One accompanying headline proclaimed “An Amazing Woman and Her Smile.”

Time and again, she returned to the story of her fiancé, Dave, tragically killed in the North Tower—Dave who had one day strewn rose petals in the entry of their apartment, surprised her with two tickets to Hawaii. There, standing in a circle of orchids on the beach—all arranged by Dave—he had married her, though it wasn’t exactly an official ceremony.

No one in her survivors’ circle thought to question the astonishing story of the wedding, or of the fiancé of whose presence in her life there was no evidence. Her admirers wouldn’t dream of doubting this leader who had suffered so much, given so much.

As it turned out, Dave was an actual victim of the 9/11 attack, a man well known and liked—his full identity has not been made public—and one, investigation revealed, whose family had never heard of anyone called Tania in his life, or any marriage plans or trip to Hawaii.

The film, by Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr., is devastatingly detailed in its account of all the claims Tania’s survivors’ group accepted so unblinkingly from her. Intentionally or otherwise, the film casts a not altogether flattering light on certain aspects of the survivors’ network—the politicking, the quest for the limelight evident on the part of some. Above all, the sacrosanct status accorded claims of victimhood.

It would take a New York Times reporter’s investigation to undo Tania’s scam, and even then, one of her admirers confessed, she missed her presence—her power. The film may not be artful, but its subject surely was in her capacity to live to the hilt, so persuasively, a fabricated history. She even managed to meet with the parents of a genuine 9/11 hero, who had died saving others, and share with them her memories of her encounter with him that day. They were grateful. When Tania’s lies about meeting their son were revealed, they were kind and attributed the deception to her personal difficulties—a touch of genuine nobility in this otherwise dark story.

Corrections & Amplifications

“The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” begins at 8 p.m. An earlier version of this story stated that it began at 8:30 p.m.

Write to Dorothy Rabinowitz at Dorothy.Rabinowitz@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 13, 2012, on page D10 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Cops, Frauds and 9/11 Victims.

By JONATHAN LOPEZ

Philadelphia

In June 1882, Vincent van Gogh learned that the great German painter Albrecht Dürer had used a perspective screen—an empty picture frame strung with a series of crosshairs—as an aid to composing images from nature. Van Gogh soon acquired one, employing adjustable poles to stabilize it in the sand as he sketched along the beach at Scheveningen, outside The Hague. Guidelines corresponding to the perspective screen’s divisions can be seen in his drawings from later years, when he was living in France, suggesting that he still relied on the device to work out the spectacular foreshortening effects that characterized some of his best pictures of that period, such as “The Harvest” (1888), painted near Arles. Sun-drenched stalks of wheat dominate the foreground, while distant fields recede in a geometric quilt of greens and yellows to the high horizon, near the very top of the canvas. Writing to his brother Theo, Van Gogh compared this image to ones by the 17th-century Dutch painter Philips de Koninck, who often composed landscapes from an unconventional, downward-tilted viewpoint.

“Van Gogh Up Close,” an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, focuses on the artist’s mature tendency to push landscape and still-life motifs dramatically forward in the picture plane, yielding images cropped and arranged in radical, often miraculously unexpected ways. Room after room of sumptuous paintings from Van Gogh’s French years, ablaze with the most brilliant colors of nature, offer endless visual fascination. But the show, which unfortunately does not include “The Harvest,” has little to say about the perspective screen or De Koninck; instead, it presents abundant material on 19th-century nature photography’s possible influence on Van Gogh—a peculiar issue to emphasize, given that the painter expressed outspoken disdain for photography. The result is the Paris Hilton of art exhibitions—extremely attractive but not especially noteworthy for its intellectual insights.

Cincinnati Art Museum

‘Undergrowth with Two Figures’ (1890), by Vincent van Gogh.

The exhibition—organized by Philadelphia Museum curators Joseph J. Rishel and Jennifer A. Thompson, in collaboration with Anabelle Kienle, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and Cornelia Homburg, a Van Gogh scholar—opens with two small rooms of still lifes, most of them luscious pictures, although many have little to do with the theme of the show. “Sunflowers” (1888 or 1889), from Philadelphia’s own collection, is a virtuoso performance in color harmony, showing a ceramic vase of perky yellow blossoms against a swirling cerulean background, but it is entirely orthodox from a compositional standpoint, as the vase sits squarely in the middle distance at eye level. More aptly chosen is a second sunflower image of 1887 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicting two slightly wilted blossoms lying on a rich ultramarine blue tablecloth. The artist’s point of view is elevated and extremely tight, so that the flowers appear much larger than life-size; the thick, springy yellow brushstrokes of the petals seem almost to leap off the canvas.

The still lifes are a warm-up for the exhibition’s main event: four large galleries of landscapes, the best of which give a splendid impression of Van Gogh’s mercurial, impassioned genius. It is here that one really sees the artist applying the lessons of Dürer’s screen, stretching and bending perspectives to isolate details like sheaves of wheat, underbrush on the forest floor or raindrops pelting a freshly tilled field. The exhibition includes pictures lent by museums from around the world—Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland—as well as select private collections. But perhaps the greatest star of the show comes from the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Undergrowth with Two Figures” (1890), a stunning work that has been cleaned for the occasion and looks just as fresh as if it had been painted yesterday. Rhythmic starbursts of green, white and yellow brushstrokes race across the horizontal canvas, punctuated by the silver-gray verticals of evenly spaced tree trunks. The strolling man and woman mentioned in the title are easy to miss, but once seen they add an unmistakable note of foreboding to the composition.

Where the show falls down is in the largest of the landscape galleries, flanked on two sides by alcoves containing background material. One alcove displays a dozen 19th-century nature photographs marketed to artists as source images; there’s no evidence that Van Gogh used these, and the curators’ argument that he would still have been influenced by them is too speculative to merit the outsize presentation. The other alcove is filled with Japanese prints, most by Utagawa Hiroshige, an apt point of reference for Van Gogh, as he collected such items. Hiroshige’s high viewpoints, abrupt croppings and keen interest in the changing seasons influenced Van Gogh, as well as Claude Monet and other artists of the era. But it is unclear why so many prints are needed to demonstrate this fairly simple and well-known connection.

These alcoves would have been a good place to introduce additional issues: the perspective screen, which would be a nice item to display and fairly easy to reconstruct based on Van Gogh’s drawings of it from his letters; the precedents for Van Gogh’s compositional strategies in commercial illustrations, a question discussed in the show’s catalog but not represented in the exhibits; and the inspiration Van Gogh drew from earlier European art. That last subject receives brief attention in a narrow hallway at the end of the show, leading to the gift shop, but the few prints on view seem to have been chosen as much for their familiar names—Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jacob van Ruisdael—as for apposite formal comparisons.

The curators don’t do a particularly good job teaching art history, but this is nonetheless a very handsome show, installed with great sensitivity to harmonious visual groupings. While it would be preferable to have brains and beauty in one package, the exhibition is worth seeing for the beauty alone. The pictures, after all, speak for themselves.

Mr. Lopez is editor-at-large of Art & Antiques

A version of this article appeared February 15, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Matter Of Perspective.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

NYC-22

Begins Sunday at 10 p.m. on CBS

“NYC-22,” a police drama, and “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” a documentary on a woman who claimed falsely to have been a 9/11 victim—two outstanding shows coming up this week—don’t have anything in common other than their Manhattan settings. That is, other than their capacity to keep audiences transfixed, eyes glued to the screen, which both have in abundance.

“NYC-22,” created by novelist Richard Price, shows its colors at once. There should be nothing instantly enchanting in a saga about six rookie police officers assembling for their first day’s duty in their Harlem precinct, facing cold stares of veteran cops. They stumble around the clutter of the locker room looking for a place to store their clothes, which only earns them dark looks from the veteran officers and warnings to stay away from their things. Still it’s clear almost as soon as the young police officers hit the streets in pairs, as they begin talking to one another in language and in tones recognizable as those in which people actually speak to one another—a rare commodity in television dramas about police or anyone else—that the enchantment process has begun.

It proceeds apace as talk ends and the action begins—danger erupts suddenly for the new officers, attached to a unit focused on gangs, though they’re thrown into battle against crime of all kinds: extortion, bank robbery, domestic violence. It’s breathtaking action without a single car chase, and reflective, as so much else in this series is, of Mr. Price’s writerly eye for detail, or more precisely, reality. There is, here, none of the clamorous effort at authenticity—the noise, the profanity, the emphasis on extremes—that deadens so many urban police dramas.

There is, rather, a credible sense of life as it is lived by normal people—no small achievement for a drama packed wall to wall with extraordinary tests of courage, near calamities, and hair-raising terrors that are part of the daily lives and work of these characters, police officers. The setting—a gentrifying Harlem with fine new apartment buildings, along with the tenements and the youth gangs—is no less credible.

The young officers struggling to make good in their new roles all have their reasons for coming to this work and for the passion that drives them to succeed. The one nicknamed Lazarus (Adam Goldberg), visibly older than most rookies, joined the force after losing his job as a journalist on the crime beat. He’s a complicated man with problems—a kind Mr. Goldberg knows how to portray. Lazarus’s police colleagues are all, like him, distinctively drawn characters, particularly the slender blond beauty, Jennifer (Leelee Sobieski), a former Marine MP who served in Iraq. Watch her calm a troublesome gang member with one swift and terrorizing arm grip.

There’s terror to go around in episode one, written by Mr. Price, a tour de force that finds two of the new officers in the midst of a brutal gang battle—a spectacular scene—and two others trapped in a domestic disturbance heart-stopping in its menace. Another two are assigned to the problem of a clogged toilet. It is, in its artfulness and drama, a smashing pilot and—from the evidence of the next episodes—a reliable indicator of the quality to come.

* * *

The Woman Who Wasn’t There


Tuesday, April 17, at 8:00 p.m. on Investigation Discovery

There’s nothing artful about “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” a story all the bleaker for being true. The bleakness of this saga of the woman calling herself Tania Head, who became one of the most conspicuous exemplars of survivor heroism and fortitude, makes it, of course, no less fascinating.

She had, other survivors believed, endured inconceivable horrors. As one tells the filmmaker, “Her suffering was head and shoulders above anything any of us could have imagined.” She’d crawled, by her own testimony, over body parts and debris to escape from the South Tower’s 78th floor. She’d flown through the air, felt the pain as she hit a marble wall. “I was smelling my own skin burning.” There was more, much more. Her right arm had nearly been severed by the impact of the second plane—and still, other survivors marveled, she’d had the will to lead, to comfort and advise others. Even to assure one of them that, yes, he had suffered far less—but that was no reason to feel he didn’t merit the attention due a survivor. She became the president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, a heroine photographed endlessly in the embrace of admiring city and state leaders, her picture splashed in the paper. One accompanying headline proclaimed “An Amazing Woman and Her Smile.”

Time and again, she returned to the story of her fiancé, Dave, tragically killed in the North Tower—Dave who had one day strewn rose petals in the entry of their apartment, surprised her with two tickets to Hawaii. There, standing in a circle of orchids on the beach—all arranged by Dave—he had married her, though it wasn’t exactly an official ceremony.

No one in her survivors’ circle thought to question the astonishing story of the wedding, or of the fiancé of whose presence in her life there was no evidence. Her admirers wouldn’t dream of doubting this leader who had suffered so much, given so much.

As it turned out, Dave was an actual victim of the 9/11 attack, a man well known and liked—his full identity has not been made public—and one, investigation revealed, whose family had never heard of anyone called Tania in his life, or any marriage plans or trip to Hawaii.

The film, by Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr., is devastatingly detailed in its account of all the claims Tania’s survivors’ group accepted so unblinkingly from her. Intentionally or otherwise, the film casts a not altogether flattering light on certain aspects of the survivors’ network—the politicking, the quest for the limelight evident on the part of some. Above all, the sacrosanct status accorded claims of victimhood.

It would take a New York Times reporter’s investigation to undo Tania’s scam, and even then, one of her admirers confessed, she missed her presence—her power. The film may not be artful, but its subject surely was in her capacity to live to the hilt, so persuasively, a fabricated history. She even managed to meet with the parents of a genuine 9/11 hero, who had died saving others, and share with them her memories of her encounter with him that day. They were grateful. When Tania’s lies about meeting their son were revealed, they were kind and attributed the deception to her personal difficulties—a touch of genuine nobility in this otherwise dark story.

Corrections & Amplifications

“The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” begins at 8 p.m. An earlier version of this story stated that it began at 8:30 p.m.

Write to Dorothy Rabinowitz at Dorothy.Rabinowitz@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 13, 2012, on page D10 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Cops, Frauds and 9/11 Victims.