Clips & Articles: Music
I review the Seattle and Portland operas, and smaller opera companies, for Portland-based Oregon ArtsWatch and Artslandia, and for Classical Voice North America, the official web site of the Music Critics Association of North America, of which I am a member. I write about classical, chamber and jazz music for Oregon ArtsWatch, Classical Voice North America, and previously, for Oregon Music News, concertonet.com and Northwest Reverb. For more stories and music reviews, check the archives at www.columbian.com between 1995-2006. My 2005 National Endowment for the Arts and Columbia Journalism grant helped immensely in music coverage.

Galileo Spins Portland Opera into the 21st Century
Angela Reviews Phillip Glass' Galileo, Portland Opera's first 21st-Century piece
Originally Published on ConcertoNet.com March 2012
Hats off, including those floppy Renaissance berets, to Portland Opera for setting its first 21st-Century opera. A West Coast premiere, Philip Glass’s chamber opera, Galileo, appropriately was staged at the 880-seat Newmark Theatre, an intimate venue compared to PO’s usual place, the sprawling 2,992-seat Keller Auditorium. Read More

Choreographer Garth Fagan’s “Griot New York”
Angela talks to Tony Award-winning choreographer Garth Fagan
Originally Published on Oregon Arts Watch March 5, 2012
After jazz musician Wynton Marsalis watched the love duet “Spring Yaounde” in rehearsal, he tore up the music he’d written for that section of “Griot New York.”
The duet was the most beautiful dance he’d seen, Marsalis told Garth Fagan, “Griot’s” creator. And the third dance in the full-length piece, “Yaounde” features a novel kiss that travels from chin to mouth to forehead while dancers pull off leg extensions demanding Herculean off-center balancing. Marsalis was blown away. Read More

Garth Fagan Dance at Portland Jazz Festival 2012
Oregon Music News Review of Garth Fagan Dance at Portland Jazz Festival 2012
Originally Published on Oregon Music News February 20, 2012
The Portland Jazz Festival brings a single dance event to its lineup when it joins with White Bird at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Read More

Dee Dee Bridgewater at Portland Jazz Festival 2012
Portland Jazz Festival 2012: Bridgewater honors Billie Holiday (aka Eleanora Fagan)
Originally Published on Oregon Music News February 21, 2012
Dee Dee Bridgewater, as huge a name in jazz vocals as Roy Haynes’ is in drumming, is doing more than headlining the 2012 Portland Jazz Festival.
She is honoring Lady Day, aka Billie Holiday, one of jazz’s pioneering singers and influences. Read More

“Madame Butterfly” at Portland Opera
‘Madame Butterfly’ waits on the hill
Originally Published on Oregon ArtsWatch Review February 7, 2012
Giacomo Puccini created stunning music and synched it precisely with unfolding drama. He drew characters with staying power — after he revised and revised. Even world-weary music critics love his work, and love it over again when the opera is well done. Madame Butterfly, winding up this week with final Portland Opera performances Thursday and Saturday at the Keller Auditorium, sold out both previous performances this week because the piece is among the best-known and beloved in the canon, but also because it has heartbreakingly lyrical music, a heartbreaking story — and because of Butterfly. She is a helluva character. She’s tough. She’s sweet. She’s complex. Read More

Q&A with Peter Yarrow in Portland
Peter Yarrow. the Peter in Peter, Paul and Mary, revisits Portland, politics and Pete Seeger music
Originally Published on Oregon Music News January 18, 2012
Peter Yarrow of the former culture-shaping Peter, Paul and Mary still sings, still protests, and still believes in music’s power to change the world. Read More

3 Cohens at Portland Jazz Festival 2011
Exuberant 3 Cohens exhibit chops, stage passion and filial harmony in Portland
Originally Published on Oregon Music News February 27, 2011
There was exuberance – the kind among families who all know the same joke — Saturday afternoon on the Crystal Ballroom. stage as the 3 Cohens lit up the big, airy Portland music space with their new-wave originals and updated standards. A new, and yet unnamed CD, will follow soon, and it was clear some of the pieces we heard came from that. Read More

SF JAZZ at Portland Jazz Festival 2011
SF JAZZ Collective premieres Stevie Wonder in all its wonder
Originally Published on Oregon Music News February 27, 2011
How were we to know that Portland would be the first audience to hear SF JAZZ Collective’s interpretation of the great Stevie Wonder, who as vibes man Stefon Harris says, “played the sound track of my life.” Read More
Gary Houston’s Music Posters
Gary Houston’s clever hand-pulled music posters keep Voodoo Catbox hoppin’
Originally published in Oregon Music News
Gary Houston has been hand-pulling silkscreen collectibles since he began Voodoo Catbox in 1995 in Portland. It was born from his 8-year-old graphic design and screen-printing business, so he was poised to find a place in the rock ‘n’ roll poster world. He doesn’t use a computer. He does everything by hand – from lettering to drawing to silk-screening. Many of his posters go for $30, but some bring in $450. He’s sold one piece for $600. The Chinese invented screen-printing 2000 years ago, he says, and nothing much about the craft has changed. He calls the work hands-on, physical, creative and romantic. “It’s leaving a little bit of history.” Read More

Valerie Day talks about the refreshed Nu Shooz and the new CD — ‘Pandora’s Box’
Oregon Music News CD Review of "Pandora's Box"
Originally Published on Oregon Music News September 9, 2010
Portland’s long-lived and much-loved Nu Shooz has turned its band into an orchestra and its musical talents to its newly released CD, “Pandora’s Box,” a mix of tunes described as “James Bond meets James Brown.” Expect a lot more than that — including a honeyed version of the 1955 jazz standard, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.”
ndeed the recording is packed with surprises, musical leaps and 14 tunes, many originals by Nu Shooz’ songwriter John Smith, who happens to be lead singer Valerie Day’s husband. Day is the face and the voice of the two-decades-plus-old group, who burst on the scene with its breakthrough mid-‘80s hit, “I Can’t Wait.” An anniversary edition of that song is the final cut on the new CD.
I talked with Day to find out what’s up with the new and the old Shooz. Read More