Archive for September, 2009
I am really looking forward to the Judy Collins concert. I will never forget the first time I heard her voice. I was a student at Alverno and I walked into the cafeteria for breakfast. The kitchen had the radio on and Judy Collins was singing, “Both Sides Now”. Her voice was so pure, sweet, and calming. I was enchanted with her voice. Since then I’ve been a big fan. I continue to listen to her music and this will be my first concert seeing Judy Collins. So, I’m really excited.
Before I start this, I feel as if I should be justifying my bona fides as a blogger. This impulse surely runs counter to the blogging urge where little by way of justification is ever really called for and probably speaks more to my own set of neuroses than to any requirements of the form. So let me get the mea culpas out of the way and move on to things that with some luck will be more interesting.
I’m a presenter. I run a series that focuses on jazz, world music and contemporary dance. I’m lucky. I get to see a lot of good work. (I also see a lot more mediocrity and — with surprising rarity, but still greater frequency than, say, appearances of Haley’s Comet — some out and out crap. It all really does fit surprisingly well within a Bell Curve.) But life is short, and there’s certainly enough good work in that far eastern sector of the Curve, more than I have the means, time and resources to present myself, that it seems worthwhile to let you know about it.
Like most (but not all) presenters, I’m a generalist. The job demands breadth. While I can sometimes dig a little deeper into a performer or a genre that is especially engaging or occasionally beguiling, one of the defining aspects of the job is that I am in frequent contact with specialists who know far more about their area of expertise than I ever will. This is both humbling and exhilarating.
We’ll forgo the humbling part of this. (I think reference to my neuroses in the opening paragraph has this covered.)
More often than not, when I find out about something good, it’s because an aficionado of the subset in question knows that I am a willing audience for his or her obsession. William Blake asked “enough, or too much”. I tread that divide. Great art, happily, does not.