[Dixielandjazz] Music, where to find it in NYC

[Steve Barbone]

We are seeing many of these types concerts in the Philadelphia - Wilmington
area also. It seems that developers, property owners get some tax breaks for
making such events available. Churches are tax free anyway, but they also
are providing venues for concerts here. These type venues work well for
Barbone Street Jazz Concerts.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

A Joyful Noise: Midday Music

NY TIMES - By BEN SISARIO - January 18, 2008

I had never seen anyone walk through a church so fast.

NOTE: Article included a photo of:
A midday audience of fans and tourists listening to the Harlem Blues and
Jazz Band at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan.

It was 2:42 on a Monday afternoon, and the last sweet note of a piece by the
obscure 18th-century composer Amédée Rasetti had just rung out in the Good
Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church near Lincoln Center. Almost as soon as
the applause began, audience members began darting to one corner of the
room, and it took a moment to see what everybody was after: doughnut holes!

My stomach had rumbled a bit through the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players¹
lunchtime reading of the Rasetti piece, a lighthearted, Mozartean trio for
piano, bassoon and flute. So I queued up and got my snack of tea and
Munchkins, which really hit the spot.

The evening performance is the standard event in the classical calendar,
when moneyed patrons patronize, premieres get their premieres, and reviewers
review. But an equal, if humbler, part of the musical landscape is the
weekday afternoon recital, when artists take to churches, corporate atriums
and even big concert halls to play for lunching workers, retirees and all
other daytime music lovers. And with tickets to evening events at Carnegie
Hall and Lincoln Center typically exceeding $30, noontime shows have another
attraction: They¹re usually much cheaper, if not free.

In sheer range and quality these events rival their evening counterparts.
Over two weeks of daytime concerts, I was entertained in some of the most
beautiful houses of worship in New York by world-class professional
musicians; saw the New York Philharmonic with the pleasant buzz of my
morning coffee still lingering; and dodged palm trees and 9-to-5ers as part
of a music-theater performance at the World Financial Center downtown.

Sweets not withstanding, the real nourishment at Good Shepherd-Faith was the
music. The Jupiter players do afternoon and evening concerts on 20 Mondays a
year, and in tribute to Jens Nygaard, who founded the Jupiter Symphony in
1979 and died in 2001, they offer both familiar and nonstandard repertory.
This year¹s brochure lists August Klughardt, Bernhard Henrik Crusell,
Woldemar Bargiel and other barely known composers alongside Tchaikovsky and
Schumann. 

Most major classical organizations shy away from such material, fearing it
will intimidate listeners, but for Mei Ying, who was Mr. Nygaard¹s companion
and is the manager of the Jupiter, it can engage them even further.

³I look at it as Music Appreciation 101,² she said. ³Brahms, who is so huge
to us today, has overshadowed so many wonderful composers that also worked
in his time and were his friends and colleagues, people like Friedrich
Gernsheim and Anselm Hüttenbrenner. We¹ve done their pieces, and the
audience gets to see not only that Brahms is alive, but that there were
other people in his time who are alive.²

Just as new to me was the eerily beautiful medieval music performed by the
vocal and instrumental trio Trefoil the week before Christmas. As part of
the weekly Midtown Concerts series at St. Bartholomew¹s Church on Park
Avenue, the members of Trefoil played 14th-century Italian nativity music in
the church¹s intimate chapel at 1:15. They began by slowly walking up the
aisle, and from my spot in the 6th of 15 rows I could hear each voice
distinctly as it passed, in clear, otherworldly harmonies.

The 35-minute program was free, and every spot was taken, with the last
three rows expeditiously ³reserved for latecomers.²

I dropped $2 in the donation basket for the concert series, as I did at
Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan the next afternoon. Most of the events
there and at St. Paul¹s Chapel nearby are classical, but the most recent
show featured the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, a group of elders who played
Duke Ellington and old-time New Orleans music to fans and tourists. The
oldest player is 92, but the band members weren¹t the ones who needed
loosening up. ³Put your hands together ‹ act like you¹re in a Baptist
church,² Ruth Brisbane, the singer, told the crowd, which grew slightly less
timid in response.

Just because such concerts take place at lunchtime doesn¹t necessarily mean
food is involved. It is, of course, not appropriate to eat in a church. And
if you see the New York Philharmonic in one of its 12 concerts on Friday
mornings or afternoons this season, the sandwiches and brownies for sale at
intermission should stay outside the auditorium at Avery Fisher Hall. Two
weeks ago, at a sold-out 11 a.m. program of Mendelssohn, Mozart and Elgar,
it might have been difficult for the ushers to enforce that rule. Unlike
many Lincoln Center performances that are nominally sold out, just about
every seat was actually filled. (Tickets, starting at $26, were slightly
cheaper than for the same program the night before.)

Many concerts, however, are in public spaces where eating may even be
expected. The Juilliard School has long had a Tuesday-afternoon series at
180 Maiden Lane, an office tower near South Street Seaport, where students
perform in an open court for people who only have so much time before their
bosses expect them back at their desks. This week offered a concert rarity:
a solo harp recital.

Grace Cloutier played transcriptions of Bach and Britten, making casual but
educational remarks before each piece. I experienced glissando after airy
glissando in close range while munching (discreetly) on an avocado chicken
wrap that I brought.

In addition to having access to some of the greatest professional musicians
in the world, New Yorkers are blessed with some of the most talented
students as well, whose homework can be our entertainment. At Juilliard
public series like the one at Maiden Lane are an important part of the
curriculum.

³One of the educational requirements for students is that they get
performance experience,² Derek Mithaug, director of career development at
Juilliard, said. ³These kinds of concerts tend to attract a wide range of
audiences, and they are a wonderful opportunity to connect to people who
would not normally come into a concert hall.²

Mr. Mithaug books students at parks and office buildings all over the city,
and said these performances feature some of the school¹s most experienced
players because they must be vetted by faculty members before representing
the school in public.

For businesses the joy of music is not the only benefit. Real estate
developers can obtain zoning bonuses for creating privately owned public
spaces that can be used for arts events. And a classy music series is
valuable public relations, said Judith A. Jedlicka, president of the
nonprofit Business Committee for the Arts.

³A hotel chain might come and say, ŒWe¹d like to be different from our
competitors, and we¹d like to do it with the arts,¹ ² Ms. Jedlicka said.

American Express, Merrill Lynch and Brookfield Properties sponsor an
extensive series at the World Financial Center, and one afternoon last month
in the cavernous Winter Garden there the avant-garde string quartet Ethel
presented a semitheatrical concert with a solstice theme. Augmented by four
pianists and a few actors, the quartet meandered through the Winter Garden
as rivers of people came and went, some barely seeming to notice the music.

Informal contexts like this have a higher threshold for noise than do formal
concert halls. Inside the gorgeous Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue,
where Donato Cuzzato played the unusual organ ‹ it includes shofar and
klezmer clarinet stops ‹ I was barely fazed by the honks and screeches
coming in from the street. Sacred or profane, it all just seemed a part of
the city.

At the same time, daytime concertgoers can be the best behaved of all. At
Good Shepherd-Faith, where the Jupiter clientele is mostly retirees, all sat
in rapt silence once the music began. I have never witnessed such decorum
even at the Metropolitan Opera, where tickets cost up to 15 times as much.

At first I thought people might have fallen asleep, something I¹ve seen
plenty of times at the Met. (And at the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall.) But
every eye was focused on the musicians and every face was lost in thought.
They were all there for the most important part of their day, the music.

The free snacks were just the icing on the doughnut hole.