Weekend Reviews

A COOL DIP INTO AUSTIN'S BLUES AT ANTONE'S

Rock: Antone's Anniversary
Indie rock: Bobby Bare, Jr.
Rock: Mission of Burma
Drama: "The Two Lives of Napoleon Beazley"
Symphonic music: "Texas Festival Orchestra"

Web posted: July 18, 2005

In the great glory days of Austin blues, Antone's was the Barton Springs of our city's music scene. People flocked there. The musical waters were bracing — and to dive beneath the surface was to feel urgently alive. Best of all, you felt the spirit of the waters in your body long after the swim was over.

Time and taste and tragedy have changed the scene since the 1980s and '90s, and the blues no longer rule in Austin. But for fans of a certain age or sensitivity, Antone's annual monthlong July birthday party remains a joyful ritual, a blues family reunion, a time to feel those familiar rhythms again and remember.

"If you feel good, howl one time," former Muddy Waters bassist Calvin Jones exclaimed after leading the birthday band through a rowdy rendition of "Ludella" on Saturday. And who wouldn't feel good, hearing Derek O'Brien and Sue Foley trade guitar solos over Lou Ann Barton's "Sugar-Coated Love"? The last I saw Clifford Antone, he was playing air guitar on an imaginary bass as the crowd clapped along to pianist Pinetop Perkins' piano solo on "Kansas City."

The sassiest set of the final three nights was a women-only guitar ensemble fronted by Foley, Cindy Cashdollar and Carolyn Wonderland. Cashdollar was all about sultry, liquid textures, slipping and sliding on her lap steel guitar. Wonderland played the perfect counterpoint, jumping in with muscular, rock-styled solos on her round-toned Gibson. Foley — the leader of this blues pajama party — tied it all together, the solos on her pink Telecaster sometimes jagged, sometimes jazzy, always rich with rhythm.

The last song on the last night was a tribute to Albert Collins, as O'Brien and Foley ripped through loving solos on "Backstroke" that both quoted and captured the spirit of their late friend. A few old-timers had tears in their eyes, cognizant of all that is alive and all that is lost to us, understanding that the source of those spirit-waters is the very essence of the blues.
— Brad Buchholz

Indie rock

ALL SAX, NO BASS LEAVES US BARE

"Why a sax and no bass?" I asked Bobby Bare Jr. after a disjointed, vaguely experimental set at the Continental Club last week.

"Because it rooooooocks!" he said, parting his taut curls and shifting his attention from a pint of bourbon and Coke.

Fair enough. But roll the guitar-drums-sax trio did only intermittently. It wasn't exactly Jr.'s fault, though; it's not like he's selling enough records — yet — to tour with his entire Young Criminals' Starvation League, a punk-and-Pixies-influenced collective of 19 mostly roots-based studio assassins. At least that's how many played on Jr.'s "From the End of Your Leash," a sure-shot album about killing valentines, vomiting in tour vans and the Devil — as a metaphor for cocaine — crawling up one's nose.

Substituting a bass for a horn, while also forgoing the sunflowers normally wrapped around Jr.'s mikestand, stripped the League of the barn-burning flower power they displayed during South by Southwest. No matter how fast baritone saxophonist Deanna Varagona huffed and puffed, tempos and harmonies came undone, occasionally forcing Jr. to throw away one of his many precious, wry lyrics. (Jr. did mumble something about drummer Brian Kotzur playing bass lines; later, a Web search yielded that he and Kotzur induce basslike noise by duct-taping the root note on a keyboard — a trick learned from Yo La Tengo.)

Watching Jr. onstage — no-necked, stodgy, New Balance discarded in favor of socks — he didn't fit the profile of someone who was born in the Ryman Auditorium, and who had his umbilical cord snipped by Roy Acuff. But lineage to a chart-topping, songwriter father was apparent on any number of tracks. On the comical yet heartfelt "Your Adorable Beast," a song about a "half-crazy and mangy" man transformed by love, Jr. sang, "If you are hurt, I will lick it/If you feed me, I won't forget it/ If I mess up, just rub my nose in it."

Regrettably, a thwack across the nose with a rolled-up newspaper seemed more fitting.
— Michael Hoinski

Rock

BURMA AGES LIKE A FINE WINE, ONLY PUNKIER

Watching them at an impossibly sweaty (but far from sold out) Emo's on Friday, you could be forgiven for forgetting that there's no reason Mission of Burma should be as good as they are.

There's no logic to it, precious little precedent for it. Bands just don't come out of a 19-year hiatus, as Burma did in 2002, tanned, rested and ready. But Burma did, and judging how many long-gone bands have reformed in the past three years (word to the Pixies and what's up Slint) it's entirely possible Burma can be credited or blamed for it. Surely, the Pixies' Frank Black sat there and said, "Well, heck, if they can do it . . ."

It helps that Burma's songs haven't aged a day. Back in the very early '80s, guitarist Roger Miller, bassist Clint Conley and drummer Peter Prescott mapped out the complex/chaotic songwriting style that defined much of the American indie rock than came after it, but nobody has ever sounded quite like Burma; their admixture of art, pop hooks and meat-'n'-potatoes riffology remains singular. (As opposed to openers I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, who have improved immensely over the past year or so, but, as a colleague put it after one particularly icy melody, "How was that song not written in 1983?)

Burma took an impossibly warm room after sets from Chosen Darkness and Sally Crewe, who went on mighty early. Joined by Shellac bassist Bob Weston, who holds down the tape-loop/sound mixing slot formerly occupied by Marin Swope, who declined to join the reunion in '02, Burma tore through two muscular sets of old chestnuts (there were a few aging punks who got teary when the band ripped though the unexpected "Peking Spring" and the anthems "Academy Fight Song" and "That's When I Reach For My Revolver") and songs so new the public was hearing them for the first time. Even on borrowed equipment, the trio blew down doors; new material such as Prescott's shout-along "The Enthusiast" blended perfectly with the Dada-ode "Max Ernst's Dream" and the shuddering "Trem Two."

Moral? If you have the tunes and the juice, age ain't nothing but a number.
— Joe Gross

Drama

NAPOLEON BEAZLEY STORY OVERSHADOWS MISSTEPS

Austin playwright John Fleming doesn't mince matters in his compelling drama, "The Two Lives of Napoleon Beazley."

In 1994, the 17-year-old Beazley — a high school honor student from the East Texas town of Grapeland with no prior record — shot and killed a prominent Tyler man when Beazley and two cohorts hijacked the man's Mercedes. Beazley was black; an all-white jury took 30 minutes to sentence him to death. Using news stories, legal documents and interviews, Fleming pieces together the story that follows Beazley's unsuccessful appeals process to get his sentence commuted to life in prison.

Told primarily through the eyes of Beazley's attorney Henry Boyd (Chuck Ney), the two-and-a-half-hour drama consists mostly of quick, episodic scenes, with most of the ensemble cast flipping between multiple characters while Beazley (Forest Van Dyke) remains upstage behind bars.

Fleming's narrative approach makes for some dense information spun out in sometimes equally dense legalese. And occasionally the rapid character switches weren't always deft. But Fleming, incoming chairman of the theater department at Texas State University, adds enough dramatic touches to his somewhat overly long script to keep the emotions on edge and the tragic story evolving.

Van Dyke impresses with his portrayal of the protean Beazley — a thoughtful young man who impressively, and eloquently, grapples with the crime he committed and the injustice he is dealt. Unfortunately, Ney, who, as Beazley's lawyer, is on stage through virtually the entire play, stumbled and hesitated to the point of distraction.

Still, Fleming's play and director Jeremy Torres' production do justice to Beazley's tragic story.

("The Two Lives of Napoleon Beazley" continues at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 5 p.m. on Sundays through July 31. Austin Playhouse, Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress Ave., Bldg. C. $13-$15, 477-5665. www.originaltheatre.org)
— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Symphonic Music

SOUNDS LIKE FRENCH SPIRIT AT ROUND TOP

The summer season at the International Festival-Institute at Round Top concluded Saturday with the Texas Festival Orchestra playing under guest conductor Pascal Verrot, and for a third time in as many summers I was impressed by the man's ability, with only a few rehearsals, to make this good American orchestra sound like a first-class French ensemble.

I can only surmise what comprises this sound. Verrot's woodwind choir is especially prominent, not because he asks them to play louder but because the strings and brass are relatively restrained. This French sound has lightness and buoyancy, versus the heavier, fatter tone encountered in many German orchestras. Above all, Verrot's orchestra never plays louder than it can play beautifully.

Cιsar Franck's familiar music for orchestra —the Symphony in D minor and the "Symphonic Variations" — is sober and abstract. In Verrot's hands, the less familiar tone poem "Le Chausseur Maudit" (The Cursed Hunter) zipped along at a bracing gallop, with snappy rhythm and shifts in the harmony that were executed nimbly and clearly.

The Festival-Institute's artistic director James Dick was the soloist in Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major. His veiled sound got all the way to my ears in the back of the hall, and his fingerwork was in excellent shape. I missed in the work's single movement variety of mood or character to reflect the main theme's transformations. And at the conclusion, instead of feeling that we had reached the goal of the journey, the music simply stopped.

Camille Saint-Saλns' Organ Symphony got an affectionate, detailed performance from Verrot and the orchestra. Unfortunately, the electronic organ played by Matthew Dirst, while sounding pleasant, failed to produce half enough foundation-shaking sound to enrich the sound of the music properly. The symphony was good instead of galvanizing.
— David Mead