Pianist Bill Charlap, artistic director for Jazz in July 2010, recently sat down with us to discuss his vision and history with this special series.
In the video above, hear him recall the first time he played in Jazz in July, what makes Jazz in July so special, and the influence Dick Hyman had over him and the festival. “I remember very fondly the first time that I played at Jazz in July, when Dick Hyman was artistic director,” Charlap told us. “I was 20 years old, it was 1987, and I was one of four pianists: Dick Hyman, Roger Kellaway, Marian McPartland and myself. Boy, I was terrified. I was in awe of these people, and I still am.”
And now, 23 years later, he is the artistic director.
For more information on the series and the individual concerts, or to purchase tickets, visit 92Y.org/Jazz online.
Tzipi Livni: “I will be prime minister. It’s about the future of my state.”
As leader of the Kadima Party, Tzipi Livni is one of Israel’s most prominent and influential political figures. She recently answered questions for the New York Times:
You’re the leader of the centrist Kadima Party, which is an opposition party. Yet you don’t sound very opposed to the views of the ruling party.
On the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself, there is no opposition in Israel.
Have you met frequently with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party?
Netanyahu is my next meeting.
When does his term expire?
About three years from now.
Do you think he will be pushed out before his term ends, as often happens in Israeli politics?
If he does the right thing, he has a future, but in order to do the right thing, he needs to make new decisions, new policy and a completely different coalition. Otherwise the Israelis are going to change the government.
By “right thing,” do you mean he needs to move beyond his longstanding aversion to a two-state solution?
Yes, he said a few months ago that he supported this idea of two nation-states, and now we are at the beginning of the proximity talks. This is going to be tested by decisions, not by words. It’s going to be tested in the near future.
You lost to him in the race for prime minister last year. Will you run again?
I will be prime minister. It’s about the future of my state.
It’s been a few weeks since we last posted a How To video, but we’ve got another one for you today with 92Y May Center instructor Alicia Principe instructing you on the basics of pilates.
If you’ve missed any previous How To videos, you can watch all of them in this handy playlist.
Here is a selection from our personal favorite, the short story You Destroyed Everything, by Meredith Turits:
My earliest memory of my sister is breaking her arm on a seesaw. We were two or three, and I was angry that she wouldn’t keep up the rocking motion. The fragmented recollection has me stomping up to her and using my entire body to push her to the grass in our backyard. I remember my mother, miraculously home at the time, chastising me, sending me back inside, and then ordering the nanny to get Anaïs to the hospital. This is the sequence my mind has woven over time, that I’ve pieced back together from the stories told at family holidays, the photo albums, and the small scar from where the cast dug into her toddler arm. But the sound of her screaming when she hit the ground, her tender bones breaking because I pushed too hard — that’s something I can’t possibly forget.
I have little clips of memories that follow, ones that become entire films as we age in their scenes. Of course we clung to each other from the start; not only were we bound by blood, but the only markers that made us separate people were our differing first names and genders. Mix a brother-sister bond with a birthday separated by only seconds, absent parents, and enough money to buy whatever form of happiness was on tap, and the subsequent interaction isn’t rocket science. It was as natural and expected as anything else on the planet. To find out it wasn’t — well, I was never told otherwise.
Our parents were young, loaded, and deep into their careers in international finance, as well as their self-absorbed storybook romance. My father, American with a mother from France, and my mother, French Canadian, had met in business school in Montreal, married quickly, and planted their shallow roots. When they were barely thirty, Anaïs and I happened accidentally, but our births didn’t stop their business ventures and European trysts.
Read the rest of that story, and more than a dozen other incredible works, in Podium, Issue 8.
Film: Bunny and the Bull: An extraordinary visual feast from the director of The Mighty Boosh, featuring the crème-de-la-crème of British comedy talent, including Noel Fielding, Julian Barrett and Richard Ayoade.
Nathan Lane Talks To Jordan Roth About His Mental Health
Capital, New York’s newest website about yes, New York, attended Sunday’s Broadway Talks event with Nathan Lane and Jordan Roth. Reporter Evan Johnston wrote:
At the 92nd Street Y last night Lane tried his best to show that offstage, he’s a Broadway true-believer. Just look at his enthusiasm for The Addams Family, in which he plays family patriarch Gomez.
Or wait, don’t. While Lane’s performance has gotten good notices, the show’s been thoroughly panned. Ben Brantley, usually a liker of things, called Addams Family a “collapsing tomb” in the first sentence of his review. But the critics didn’t just say The Addams Family was bad; some said it was evil. Elisabeth Vincentelli of The New York Post accused the writers of making “a move to court the Wicked crowd,” and sneered that in one song, characters “crackle with the intensity of Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber fighting over a Twinkie.”
“It’s a high profile show,” Lane said to the audience at the 92nd St Y last night. “People write about it and say things, and if you don’t give birth to a masterpiece you fail!”
Lane went on to opine of the screen-to-stage-to-screen adaption of The Producers, speculation about his mental state and his recollection of receiving offers of psychiatric help. Read the full piece here.
Related: Jordan Roth spoke with The Wall Street Journal about his experience with the series this year.
92Y Podcast: From the Poetry Center Archive: W.H. Auden
W.H. Auden’s affiliation with the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center began in our very first season (1939) and continued for more than thirty years. His last appearance was in 1972, and today’s featured recording is an excerpt of that reading. Here is how Richard Howard introduced him that night:
We are fortunate to have with us this evening not merely the citizen, the school-master, the church-warden and the other members of the best repertory company in poetry today. We have the poet himself, who at 65 is so familiar and yet so unrivaled.
Unique in our time in that he believes in knowledge, knowledge in the poetry, and extending the scope and range of inquiry and response beyond the condescension of mere public appearance. If you have been keeping up with him, which means keeping up with what glory can be given to the English language in our generation as well as his, you know that, these days, under the sign of a consented-to mortality, he is concerned with boundaries, limitations, definitions, the precarious identifications which make our life possible—the naming, which was Adam’s first task and Auden’s to the last, or to the latest. Hence the famous and extraordinary vocabulary and the wonderful meter—you will notice in a minute that he does not read his poems off the page, but out of his ear—and all those alliterative bells and charms. That is a magic neither black nor white. That is full color.
Howard ended his introduction with this casual couplet:
For decades, Wystan Hugh Auden has devised new ways to broaden the mind of the age.
Often, as right now, from this very stage.
Auden began with several late poems—“Natural Linguistics,” “Epistle to a Godson,” “Lines to Dr. Walter Birk,” among others—but today’s excerpt comes from the second half of his performance, when he read a group of early lyrics. The excerpt culminates, as the reading did, with his recitation of “Metalogue to The Magic Flute,” which was composed for Mozart’s bicentenary in 1956 and includes the following passage:
How seemly, then, to celebrate the birth
Of one who did no harm to our poor earth,
Created masterpieces by the dozen,
Indulged in toilet-humor with his cousin,
And had a pauper’s funeral in the rain,
The like of whom we shall not see again.
In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.
Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.
You can also download the MP3. [17 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
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Bill Charlap and Renee Rosnes: ‘Jazz Power Couple’
“It’s not like two pianists playing together. In a sense, it’s almost like both of us become this new entity—four hands at two pianos becomes kind of a new pianist amalgamation of both of us.” That was pianist Bill Charlap on NY1, describing what it’s like playing the piano with his wife, Renee Rosnes. In turn, Rosnes confided: “I feel like I can kind of do anything on the piano and Bill will get my back and Bill will be there to support me.”
You can watch the segment here on NY1. And on Wednesday July 28, as part of Jazz in July, Renee and Bill will play together, along with a half dozen other musicians, in Postcard from Brazil, a celebration of the unique cultural melding of Brazilian music and American jazz.
The Jewish Weekhas a feature story on “First-Time Campers.” “This week as the Jewish camp season kicks off in the Northeast,” they remarked, “it is shaping up to be a banner year for the Jewish camp world.”
Alan Saltz, Director of the 92nd Street Y Camp Program, spoke with them about Passport NYC, an amazing sleepaway camp experience that celebrates creativity, social responsibility and Jewish values. Alan explained: “...camp is more a philosophy and state of mind than a place.”
“You can be in the country and have a most un-campy experience,” he said, adding that his staff is very focused on “how do we reproduce that camp feeling” and on imbuing everything with “that sense of community and togetherness.”
“This is much more than kids coming and learning about film, music and culinary arts,” he said. “We will also have the sense of ritual, the fun things they are going to be doing and learning together: meals, Shabbat celebrations, community service, nighttime activities and meetings.”
On Flamenco Dance, Lisa Yuskavage, and Gen. David Petraeus
Photo by Grant Delin. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.
Patricia Zohn has a fantastic article up on The Huffington Post discussing her experience attending a presentation by the artist Lisa Yuskavage. Yuskavage, one of the most recognized and controversial painters of her generation who often deploys exaggerated images of the female body, was here in April. Zohn described what happened:
I was just finishing up a flamenco class at the 92nd Street Y surrounded by women jabbering in Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Farsi, Italian--proving the international allure of accessing not only your inner pole dancer but your inner flamenco dancer--when I saw people had already begun lining up for the presentation by artist Lisa Yuskavage, she of the va-va-voom paintings. As I hurried to change, I could hear protesters outside inveighing against the appearance of General Petraeus who was already holding forth in the auditorium downstairs on the various wars.
Zohn continued, remarking on the juxtaposition of music, the anti-war chants, the nudity and the General, “I hardly knew which way to turn (that is the problem with me in flamenco class, I am never knowing which way to turn).”
Upcoming Lectures & Conversations at 92Y include: Nathan Lane in Conversation with Jordan Roth (Jun 27); Reel Pieces: Helen Mirren and Taylor Hackford (Jun 28) and Charles Ogletree with Soledad O’Brien on Race, Class and Crime (Jun 30).
“Beading? I’d never done it before I moved to Manhattan in 2001,” Roz Singer told The Transition Network. “Here I was in the city—I didn’t know anybody, so I needed to be involved in something where I’d meet new people. And so I took a class in beading at the 92nd Street Y.”
Roz was a quick learner, and in short time was making beautiful beaded necklaces that on occasion, people wanted to purchase. But she doesn’t create the necklaces with intent to offer them for sale. She does it for the process: “It’s relaxing. It’s stimulating. It’s exciting. I adore it.”
Picture of Heath: Celebrating Living Legend Jimmy Heath
“Improvisation is democracy at its best. Everybody has a right to speak their mind musically.”
That was Jimmy Heath on WNYC’s Soundcheck this past Tuesday, interviewed by Jeff Spurgeon. At the end of the interview, Spurgeon asked him about legacy: “What’s your?” he inquired.
“I just want to be remembered as a composer and some of my compositions lasting,” Heath revealed. “Some of them have become jazz standards, as they call them, and that’s good for me.”
And don’t forget the Jimmy Heath tribute at the 92nd Street Y on July 21: Picture of Heath: Celebrating Living Legend Jimmy Heath. That tribute concert will feature Heath and many others, part of the Jazz in July Concert Series beginning on July 20.
The Internet has been talking about Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren’s racy photos in New York magazine to promote her upcoming film, Love Ranch, based on a true story about the husband and wife team who owned Nevada’s first legalized brothel in the 1970s. You can investigate on your own but we particularly like this quote:
There’s the old joke about actors prostituting themselves for their work, but for Mirren, who’s revealed so much of herself (metaphorically and otherwise), and who has often spoken out about the way women get eaten up by the entertainment industry, it’s a complex metaphor. “The girls who work in the sex industry, they put themselves out of their bodies. An actor does sort of the opposite,” says Mirren, who talks about acting as giving every intimacy—emotional and physical—except actual intercourse. “People say ‘Oh, you play someone else.’ I’m always playing myself. You can only do it by going into yourself, in the deepest, most terrifying way. Not to say I haven’t ever prostituted myself quite often and happily. But in my heart it’s very serious.”
Mirren will appear (fully clothed) at 92Y for a preview screening and discussion of Love Ranchon June 28 with director (and her husband) Taylor Hackford.
The Shanghai Restoration Project put on an incredible multimedia show at 92YTribeca last month, mixing traditional Chinese music with hip-hop, jazz and interactive multimedia performance. Can you picture it? Luckily for those who missed it, you can.
Upcoming music events at 92YTribeca include: URB ALT Festival Featuring MuthaWit Orchestra, Leila Adu and Special Guests (Jun 25); Annie & The Beekeepers / The Woes (Jun 26); Spottiswoode and His Enemies / Martha Redbone (Jul 2); Noisemakers with Peter Rosenberg Featuring Diddy (Jul 6).
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As leader of the Kadima Party, Tzipi Livni is one of Israel’s most prominent and influential political figures. 
“Improvisation is democracy at its best. Everybody has a right to speak their mind musically.”
