Showing posts tagged “Durham Performing Arts Center”
Byron Woods ·
11 Nov 2009, 12:37 PM ·
2 Comments
"Let that sink in for a moment: Leonard Cohen, affirming life."
Leonard Cohen
Durham Performing Arts Center
Tuesday, Nov. 3
Durham went 10 rounds with Leonard Cohen last Tuesday night. That assessment isn’t just based on the stamina the spectrally voiced 75-year-old songwriter displayed after nimbly bounding onto the DPAC stage moments after 8 p.m. and animating 24 hits, choice obscurities—and one new work he’d premiered the week before—before dancing off three hours later, just after 11:15 p.m. It also conveys the feeling of much of that time.
Perhaps the single most underreported fact of Cohen’s career is the quality that bankrupts most of the glib descriptions he’s collected over 40 years in music—the godfather of gloom, poet laureate of pessimism, even the wryly self-bestowed “grocer of despair.” If his work is so unrelievedly dour, why did a near-capacity house leave the DPAC so conspicuously … happy?
Critics and scholars before me have connected Cohen’s muse to the notion of duende, the profound Spanish aesthetic embodied in the seemingly disparate fields of bullfighting and flamenco dance and song. To the degree it’s true—and I believe it is—for Cohen, it’s not because his basement baritone suggests anything like the trembling, high-pitched cries of the classical cantaores of flamenco. Rather, we heard that quality repeatedly Tuesday night, not in Cohen’s voice, but in the beautiful unquiet of Javier Mas’ agitated, Phrygian runs on the Spanish bandurria and archilaud—most notably in the luminous solo Mas seemingly excavated, chip by chip, out of the darkness itself at the beginning of “Who by Fire.”
Rather, Cohen’s connection to the duende lies more in the words themselves and their delivery, which at times is more spoken than sung. Much the same could be said for Federico Garcia Lorca, another poet who not only probed the duende in his verse but also wrote analytically—and lyrically—about its quality in his essays. It’s a difficult concept to translate, but duende has to do with the intimate relationship between passion and absolute disaster. It articulates the risk inherent pursuing the truest, most intensely felt emotions to the end, at all costs. Duende gives us the stern reminder that when we strive for the deepest love, we must ultimately be prepared to experience the deepest pain. It confronts us, at once, with the contradictions of intimacy and desolation; sex and alienation; love and total loss.
Since duende so admonishes and threatens us, perhaps we should be clear about what side it’s on. The answer might be surprising to some. Duende, it seems, is on the side of life. So is the art of Leonard Cohen.
Let that sink in for a moment: Leonard Cohen, affirming life. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Durham Performing Arts Center, Leonard Cohen
Rick Cornell ·
9 Jun 2009, 5:58 PM ·
2 Comments
Steely Dan: Thanks for the score, guys.
Steely Dan was my kudzu band, growing with me as I grew up in the ’70s and always seeming to find ways to wrap itself around parts of my life. Of course, growing up in a small town in upstate New York— a suburb of a suburb of Binghamton, with a population of about 500 and exactly zero stoplights—I had no idea what kudzu was.
But I’m sure Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen knew. Those guys knew everything. This was a case of opposites attracting: Becker and Fagen were edgy, worldly, wise geniuses, and I was a naïve dumbass who was as complicated as an episode of Murder She Wrote. And their music took me places—from Boston, Biscayne Bay and Barrytown to William & Mary, Haiti, Vegas and even the occasional place where kudzu grew like, well, kudzu.
I loved the tunes, too. Still do, as they maintain the power to transport me back to a terrain where music and adolescence conspired to form indelible memories. So, Steely Dan, by my years…
AGE 12
The entry point, as I was in a phase where I’d dutifully record Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 in a spiral-bound notebook every Sunday night, and both “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years” cracked Casey’s list. I knew nothing about Steely Dan—it could have been just a guy, not a band—but both songs made an impression, especially the latter. It was as catchy as it was impossible to sing along with. That fella Dan sure could sing briskly. Continue reading »
Reflections Durham Performing Arts Center, Steely Dan
Lisa Sorg ·
23 Feb 2009, 7:16 AM ·
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Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel
Durham Performing Arts Center
Friday, Feb. 20
Row I, Seats 307 and 309
Drunk man wearing boat shoes with no socks: [to leather-clad faux Harley chick sitting two seats from him.] Your hair is so black! What’s your ethnicity?
Faux Harley chick: Ethnicity? I don’t know … Southern?
[5 minutes later.] Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Durham Performing Arts Center
Andrew Ritchey ·
20 Feb 2009, 8:50 AM ·
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Ray Benson’s been playing western swing with his band, Asleep at the Wheel, for almost 40 years. The group’s latest album, Willie and the Wheel, encapsulates the genre’s history, of which Asleep at the Wheel has become an integral part. The record pairs Benson’s band with his longtime friend Willie Nelson, a former western swing singer himself.
Willie and the Wheel, y'all.
With a 14-date tour supporting the album less than a week away, Benson took some time away from rehearsal to talk about western swing, building on a tradition and Willie and the Wheel. The band plays with Willie at Durham Performing Arts Center tonight at 7:30 p.m.
Continue reading »
You Should Do This Durham Performing Arts Center
