Notes on the Culture
Every Tuesday, Matthew Reed Baker will offer his thoughts on the arts and culture scene. This week: Our columnist relives his days as a high school roadie, which didn’t get him a lot of girls, but did give him an appreciation for jazz and the New England Conservatory’s Youth Jazz Orchestra; Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima makes you suffer for his art; and the Chase Gallery wants to give you a deal.
Back in the day, when I was a precocious but sadly untalented teen, I was the roadie for my high school’s jazz band. The reality of the position was even less glamorous than it sounds—it was that glamorous. Basically, our jazz band was five dudes who liked to jam to bebop and bossanova rather than the Dead, and then they’d occasionally do so at school assembly and elsewhere. These guys were my friends, and yet I was only useful to them as a big guy who could carry amps up and down concrete stairwells.
Still, many hours of listening to records with the members of this humble jazz band was a deep and lasting musical education, as well as a good time. And besides, the group did produce one notable pro, keyboardist Jamie Saft, who has since grown up to record his own albums, as well as several with varied folk like John Zorn, the B52s, Laurie Anderson, and minimalist composer John Adams.
Why am I thinking this week of Jamie and my days as roadie of the high school jazz band? Well, he ended up getting his degree at the New England Conservatory of Music, which just launched its Youth Jazz Orchestra. Said orchestra is having its very first public performance this week, and from the looks of it, this is the jazz band he might have dreamed of back then.
The NEC’s Preparatory School has been around since 1950, and has developed a thorough curriculum for both classical and jazz. The latter program teaches students theory, ear training, and improvisation, but only this fall did it offer a full jazz orchestra.
Directed by Ken Schaphorst, the college’s jazz studies chair, the orchestra held auditions last May and began rehearsals this September. Since then, for two hours every Wednesday night, high school kids from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island have convened and put to practice what they learned, whether they played brass, piano, guitar or drums.
You can grade the results yourself this Thursday, where the crew will play an intriguingly varied program. Golden bop age composers like Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins will be represented, as well as the cooler stylings of Charlie Haden and Kenny Wheeler, and there will even be a Nawlins-style tune by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. It’s a pretty impressive repertoire, and considering the age of the performers, there’s obviously no two-drink minimum. Actually it’s free.
The NEC Youth Jazz Orchestra plays Thursday, December 18, at Brown Hall at 8 p.m.
Japanese enfant terrible: If kids playing jazz sounds too wholesome for you and you want to delve into one of the most infamous transgressive films in arthouse cinema, then the Harvard Film Archive has just your movie. The HFA is in the midst of a monthlong retrospective of Japanese directing legend, Nagisa Oshima, and his most famous work, In The Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida), is screening this Friday.
Though he’s just as revered by scholars and cineastes, Oshima never quite attained the same fame as Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi—but part of that might as well have been by design.
Deeply radical in form and content, his films sought to up-end traditional Japanese society and expose the hypocrisy beneath, and so Senses portrays a prewar Japan in filthily decadent decline as filtered through the true story of a violently obsessive love affair. Featuring explicit sex and a genuinely shocking ending that will make all men instinctively cross their legs, this film was so controversial that it had to be edited in France, with the reels sent to Europe under secrecy.
For my taste, I can’t honestly recommend it: I don’t know, maybe I’m too soft or maybe I got restless during its deliberately monotonous sex scenes. But I seem to be a minority among film buffs, and it does fill a certain niche in one’s film education. Besides, this film is hardly ever shown publicly, even if it’s no longer banned in most parts of the world.
I highlight it here though to stress again how films shown in repertory can teach you so much about history and culture, and how not every film you see need be new or made in Burbank. Read up on Oshima and this film before you go, and the phenomenon of its mere existence and its production will be fascinating. The fact that the HFA is giving you the option to see Senses or not is yet another reason to always, always support arthouse cinema in this town.
FREE ART NOW!!!!!: Last week, I wrote up a li’l holiday gift guide and stressed the point that buying art for someone always comes with fiscal and aesthetic risk. Well, maybe they heard my call—or maybe it’s our sparkling economy—but the Chase Gallery has just launched a holiday plan to let you have art for free!
Okay, so it’s not free, exactly. For the holidays, the gallery is offering deferred payment on almost all the artwork it has in inventory. That’s right: no payments and no interest for 12 months.
What’s the catch? Well, you do have to pay eventually. So what you are getting for free is one more year of enjoying a painting that you’ve coveted for a while. Hey, if it gets people into the gallery in times like these, it makes perfect sense to me.
