Irish jazz singer to honor O’Day
Melanie O’Reilly, the Celtic jazz singer who grew up in Dublin in a family of theater folk, went to Los Angeles in 2005 to interview the storied American singer Anita O’Day for her Bay Area-based radio show, “Jazz on the Bay,” which airs on Irish national broadcasting.
Unfortunately, the saucy octogenarian O’Day was in failing health and ill and couldn’t do the interview. But O’Reilly met a friend of hers, Paul Peterson, who was writing a theatrical show about O’Day. Hearing O’Reilly’s warm tone and stylish singing, he announced he’d found his Anita.
Then O’Day and Peterson both died in 2007, and the project floundered until O’Reilly took up it up several years ago, writing her own script inspired by O’Day’s 1981 memoir, “High Times, Hard Times.”
“It became a really personal thing,” says O’Reilly, who came to UC Berkeley in 2003 as a resident artist in Celtic studies, stayed in the Bay Area and later developed “Jazz on a Summer Day: A Tribute to Anita O’Day.” She performed it at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival and elsewhere, and will reprise it May 28 at San Francisco’s Bird & Beckett.
The show takes its title from the famed documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival that features a bracing performance by O’Day, who was a stylish sight in a black-andwhite, sleeveless dress, white gloves and a broad-brimmed, ostrich-feathered hat.
She’d found the garb that day in a secondhand store “and suddenly she’s on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine. She was a trend-setter,” says O’Reilly, who was besotted by O’Day’s “split-second timing and rhythmic control, and her compelling sound. It was direct and sassy.”
For more information, go to www.birdbeckett.com and http://melanieoreilly.com.
Other Minds
The American Composers Forum has tapped Other Minds founding Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian to receive its 2017 Champion of New Music award. He is one of three artists/organizations so honored for contribution to contemporary music (the others are the International Alliance for Women in Music and conductor Donald Nally and the chamber choir the Crossing). Previous recipients include such luminaries as New Yorker critic Alex Ross and conductor Marin Alsop.
Amirkhanian, a composer, percussionist and radio producer who’s been a vital force on the Northern California new music scene for decades, gets his award Saturday, May 20, at Mission Dolores when Other Minds presents Lou Harrison’s gamelan music.
Harrison, by the by, is featured on Other Minds’ new album, “Composer-Critics of the New York Herald Tribune,” a compilation of pieces by him and four other celebrated individualists who reviewed music over the years for the old Herald Trib: Paul Bowles, Virgil Thomson, Peggy GlanvilleHicks and John Cage.
For more information, go to www.otherminds.org.
Music from the ban
SF Live Arts at Cyprian’s and the Aswat Ensemble — the pan-ethnic San Francisco group that specializes in classic, folkloric and contemporary Arabic music — present “Notes Against the Ban” in a June 24 concert at St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, featuring music from the seven countries named in President Trump’s first failed travel ban: Libya, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Sudan.
The pieces will be performed by musicians from some of those countries and American colleagues, with members of the Aswat Ensemble joined by guest artists.
“Music is a microcosm of a culture,” writes ensemble director Nabila Mango. “Its rhythmic structures are the pulse, its tonal/melodic structures are the soul, and its poetry is the language of the heart and mind. We are convinced that once one has experienced the artistic richness of another culture, they are much less likely to dehumanize them by seeing them through mediapropagated stereotypes.”
For more information, go to http://sflivearts.org.
New plays for 2018
San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series recently announced it plans to premiere three plays next year, starting in February 2018 with Walt McGough’s “Non-Player Character,” a pointed comedy about an aspiring video game designer.
Dipika Guha’s “In Braunau,” opening in June 2018, features an American couple, “reeling after the last election,” who go to the Austrian town of the title with the aim of converting Hitler’s childhood home into a welcoming bed-and-dinner place. Lynn Rosen’s “Washed Up on the Potomac,” a capital mystery story, closes the series in August 2018.
For more information, go to http://sfplayhouse.org/sfph.