With loud, heavy riffs full of heart, Dusted Angel is everything a hard rock fan wants in a band. And that’s because Dusted Angel is made up of fans themselves.
“We’re at an age where we play things we’d want to hear,” says lead singer Clifford Dinsmore. “It’s a weird hybrid of everything we’ve ever been into.”
Formed while they were teenagers by Scott Stevens and Eric Fieber on guitar, and Elliot Young on bass, Dusted Angel officially solidified in 2008 when they added Dinsmore on vocals and Steve Ilse on drums. The five friends quickly began writing material and performing around town, even releasing a seven-inch single on vinyl in 2009. Unlike Dinsmore’s other band, the influential Santa Cruz hardcore group Bl’ast!, Dusted Angel is more rhythm driven, with longer riffs and stoner beats. This is for fans who like their Black Sabbath dipped in St. Vitus, and deep fried in Melvins.
“Personally, I feel like Dusted Angel is more ‘age appropriate,’” says Dinsmore. “Where Bl’ast! is so technical and all over the place, with Dusted Angel I give myself plenty of room to breathe.”
Since their inception, Dusted Angel has consistently drawn large crowds whenever they play in town, or on the road with bands like Fu Manchu and, unsurprisingly, the Melvins. Yet to this day, they still have only one recording, and Dusted Angel has become something of a local legend due to the scarcity of their shows. It’s an image the band wants to change, but a couple of years ago, Dinsmore was in a near-fatal car collision that left him with a fractured sternum and a long, drawn-out recovery.
“That’s what really set us back,” he remembers. “Once you get away from the discipline of practicing, it’s easy to let it fade away.”
Since then, the band has steadily picked up momentum, practicing more and playing several shows until another setback hit—Stevens recently learned he will need surgery on his hands, which means they’ll only have one guitar for their upcoming show.
However, not all is lost. Loyal fans can look forward to a new full-length Dusted Angel album they plan to record once Stevens has fully recovered.
“There could be a couple of songs that come out on a seven-inch first,” Dinsmore says. “But things might be on hold for a minute.”
INFO: 6pm. Portuguese Community Hall, 216 Evergreen St., Santa Cruz. $10. 423-7753.
NextSpace, founded in 2008 by Jeremy Neuner, Ryan Coonerty and Caleb Baskin—was put up for sale. And, for the past few weeks, it’s been under the watch of Pacific Workplaces, which has 18 locations that span from Carlsbad, California to Reno, Nevada. And now, Santa Cruz.
It’s a big shake-up for the local tech scene.
“Hindsight’s 20/20,” says Kurt Grutzmacher, who served as NextSpace’s third, and ultimately final, CEO. “We have a lot of things we’re pretty proud of. Maybe we tried to grow too fast. But again, that’s hindsight. There are probably a number of reasons why we could have been incredibly successful or not. I don’t think you can point to any one thing. It’s been a nine-year run.”
At a NextSpace happy hour on Friday, July 21, managers of Pacific Workplaces told members they would no longer be able to freely visit the San Jose and Berkeley NextSpace locations, at least in the short term. But the new parent company is exploring ways to make its 17 other locations available to NextSpace members, possibly for a fee. The management also promises technological upgrades soon, allowing people to more easily teleconference via the systems set up by Pacific Workplaces, which now owns those San Jose and Berkeley NextSpace locations as well.
The six other NextSpace locations—Venice Beach, Culver City, Chicago, an additional San Jose location and two in San Francisco—all closed in the past year or changed hands, most of them in the weeks before the sale.
Many members are interested to see what new ownership brings, and Coonerty, who served on NextSpace’s board, says he looks forward to remaining a member.
NextSpace launched during the early days of coworking, an idea that has evolved from a buzzword into a way of life, with Santa Cruz sometimes on the cutting edge.
Laurent Dhollande, CEO of Pacific Workspaces, calls NextSpace “legendary” and says his company learned from NextSpace’s approach. “NextSpace was an incredible success for the community. It was less of a commercial success,” he says.
With the help of Santa Cruz Sentinel columnist Wallace Baine, Neuner, the onetime NextSpace CEO, and Coonerty, now the District 1 county supervisor, co-wrote a book called The Rise of the Naked Economy: How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace. Neuner now works at Google with the department of Real Estate and Workspaces (REWS), espousing the benefits of coworking.
There’s no telling what decisions pointed toward the eventual sale, or when the company started down the path that led to that point. Did expansion a few years ago force the local company to lose sight of the region where it truly thrived? Neuner doesn’t think so.
“That was our model, to expand into other markets in San Francisco and Los Angeles and even Chicago,” says Neuner, who was CEO through 2014.
Grutzmacher says that at the end of the day, it all comes down to money, and with increased competition from well-funded alternatives popping up around the nation, NextSpace would have needed a lot of it. They realized it too late.
“The industry was evolving, and there were lot of things happening at the same time, and raising money is a full-time job,” says Grutzmacher, the company’s lead investor, who took over as CEO in early 2016, a little more than a year after Neuner moved on. “We were concentrating on the business.”
This, he adds, is all part of the world of investing. “Nothing is guaranteed,” he says. “Just make sure your winners are bigger than your losers.”
There’s no word on the size of the payoff, which is confidential. Generally speaking, though, shuttering several locations while selling everything else doesn’t scream massive profits.
As she leads me around her two downtown stores, Suna Lock giggles with joy at some of her more unusual acquisitions, many of which she picked up from surprising places—including even the city dump—before putting them out for sale at her Walnut Avenue shops. A few doors apart from one another, many people know Stripe and Stripe Men for their brand of eclecticism, which is eight years strong, thanks to Lock and her partner Dana Rader.
At Stripe, the practical-minded can peruse jewelry, clothing, mugs, and perfume. At Stripe Men, those seeking strangeness will find a collection of aspen sticks, a fine assortment of desiccated animal jaws and vintage glass insulators with original dirt inside. Two huge model planes hang from the ceiling, which Lock and Rader found at an estate sale.
Originally from London, Lock developed an affinity for Santa Cruz while interning at UCSC in 1988 and ’90. “I said, if I ever came to the States, it would be Santa Cruz,” says Lock, who’s 43 and has two children, 11 and 13. She married for the second time this summer.
Lock started Stripe Design in Santa Cruz in 2003, a few years before becoming president of the Santa Cruz Downtown Association in 2009, where she was part of a major rebranding and the sidewalk kiosk initiative. When her term with the DTA ended this year, she joined the Santa Cruz Arts Commission.
Her store is decorated with found objects and a collection of skeleton keys. One of the changing rooms is wallpapered with someone’s lifetime correspondence, which Lock found in a box at the flea market. From inside the dressing room walls, a shopper can trace the woman’s entire adult life, from when she first left home, to when her husband goes off to war, then comes back, right up to when her own children leave home. “She kept everything,” says Lock, who opened the original Stripe store in 2009. “It’s her life on the walls of the dressing room.” It’s a wonderful and arresting piece of voyeurism, and Lock admits, “some people are arguably in there longer than they should be.”
Though it isn’t their stated purpose, the stores serve as an entrée to the design business.
It just happens to work that way, she says. “People come in, like the aesthetic of the eclectic Stripe and Stripe Men stores, and naturally begin to wonder: What if my whole house looked like that?” says Lock, who calls the stores a “physical portfolio” for her design work, with their diverse collection of found, new, and locally made items. “It’s the perfect vehicle. The stores are an extraordinary playground, where we can do anything we like. I can go bananas and express myself creatively.”
Just as Stripe stores can’t be pinned to any one theme or genre, Stripe Design doesn’t claim to be retro, mid-century modern, wine country, or any one of a hundred other styles currently in vogue.In fact,Lock prides herself on being anti-trend. “My aesthetic is the quantifying factor,” she says. “It doesn’t need any other restriction.”
Her clients are as varied as her tastes. She designed Venus Spirits on Swift Street, built to resemble a 1940s speakeasy. The maritime-inspired Humble Sea Brewing features light bulbs hanging from ropes strung overhead and royal blue walls that pop beside the white ceiling. For the Santa Cruz Bicycles, which is housed in the old Wrigley building, she designed a freight elevator with couches, leopard-skin carpets and a “Mad Men”-style bar, replete with a stack of ’60s Playboy magazines. The company loved the elevator lounge—the fire marshal, not so much. (Although it’s no longer in use, a photo of it is on the Stripe website.)
Her true value goes beyond what she brings as a designer, according to Sean Venus, founder of Venus Spirits.
“What I find most endearing about Suna is that she’s a bridge to the community,” Venus says. “She’s a great designer, but she also connects clients with local artists and people that can help with the project logistically. She also helped us navigate the politics. She’s a great networker.”
Casual observers may wonder: Will Stripe stores ever become another Anthropologie? And will Stripe Design become a mainstream interior house design firm? Lock finds the very idea terrifying. “I have a fear of our stores propagating, and losing control over curation. I look at Anthropologie, in terms of a competitive business analogy. They’ve lost something. It’s very disappointing. If those words were ever said about Stripe, part of me would die.”
Those who haven’t noticed Stripe’s impact on the look of Santa Cruz shouldn’t be surprised—it’s by design. “I think it’s really important that no one can walk in and say, ‘Stripe designed this.’ If you have a signature color, then everyone knows it’s you. It’s not about us—it’s about good design.”
Staging Disney’s Beauty and the Beast for live theater is a massive undertaking. Along with the usual lavish musical production numbers, this story calls for magical spells, onstage transformations, aerial effects, video projections, and not one, but two savage wolf pack attacks. Just getting this unwieldy thing up onstage, with live actors and no CGI effects, is not a task for the faint-hearted. The trick is to make all of these intricate components work without overwhelming the love story at the show’s heart.
The ambitious new production at Cabrillo Stage works hard to maintain this delicate balance, and is reasonably successful. There were bound to be a few technical difficulties on opening night, but that’s the great thing about live theater: every new performance is a fresh start!
The good news is director-choreographer Janie Scott’s production is a trio of strong performances at its heart—Mathew Taylor as Beast, Emily Mairi Marsilia as Belle, and Carmichael James Blankenship as the narcissistic villain, Gaston. There are many other noteworthy performers in the ensemble, but it’s up to these three to sell the story. If they don’t, all the effects in the world won’t help. But if they do—as they did with gusto on opening night—then the glitches don’t matter so much.
As the title implies, this is the Disney version of the 300-year-old fairy tale, based on the studio’s hit 1991 cartoon feature. In Linda Woolverton’s book (she also scripted the movie), Belle is considered “odd” in her French country village for reading books and not being married. Gaston, a preening, muscle-bound lout, means to wed her because she’s “the prettiest girl in the village”—while keeping up his dalliances with the other fawning village girls.
Vain, pompous, belligerent Gaston is a horrible character, but a great role. And Blankenship is perfect, with his outsized, comic stage presence and powerhouse singing voice.
Belle adores her sweet-natured father, Maurice (Richard Dwyer), a somewhat dotty inventor who gets lost in the forest and stumbles into the castle occupied by Beast. In this version, he does not steal a rose; Beast throws him in the dungeon for no particular reason, and Belle braves the forest to get him released—which Beast only agrees to if she takes her father’s place.
The castle is full of talking, singing, and dancing objects that used to be human servants, changed into tableware and furniture in the same witch’s curse that turned their selfish young prince into Beast (the prologue that opens the show). Only if Beast falls in love with a woman and earns her love back will they all regain their human forms, so they’re constantly encouraging the at-first-reluctant couple.
Marsilia (last seen at CS as Mary Poppins) plays Belle as an independent young spinster; she has a beautiful voice and her emotions are true. But Taylor’s ferocious Beast anchors the emotional story, spitting out his lines with husky menace, or unexpectedly hilarious when throwing a hissy-fit. He matures into rumbling nobility with a couple of powerful solos.
Nick Rodrigues is completely charming as chipper candlestick Lumiere, especially leading the ensemble in the rousing “Be Our Guest” production number. Jordan Pierini as fussy Cogsworth, the Clock, and Angela Cesena as the operatic Wardrobe are also quite good. Mike Saenz is a funny, apparently boneless physical clown as LeFou, Gaston’s toady, and chief punching-bag.
Most opening-night glitches were from mics being smacked during the action, and some sketchy wire work. I guess the idea of using wires during the second wolf attack is so Beast, in his fury, can hurl one across the stage, but it’s a cartoony idea that doesn’t translate well; the choreography might work better without wires. On the other hand, while the audience held its collective breath in the finale, with Beast spinning precariously above the stage, his transformation was triumphant. (Or not, if, like me, you don’t want soulful Beast to turn back into the handsome prince.)
Overall, credits are up to the usual high CS standards, with special kudos to Scenic Designer Skip Epperson’s multitasking revolving castle, and the lovely rose-bordered title scrim, like a page out of an illuminated manuscript.
The Cabrillo Stage production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast plays through August 13 at the Crocker Theater, Cabrillo College. For ticket info, call 831 479-6154, or visit cabrillostage.com
Think of the different battlefronts in World War II. Now choose the one you are the gladdest that you missed. The Golden Staircase in New Guinea? Saipan? The Ruhr cities under the RAF night bombing missions, or the London blitz? That great engineer of cage-rattling cinema, Christopher Nolan, convinces you that Dunkirk ought to be way up on the list.
On the cusp of May and June 1940, tens of thousands of troops from the British Expeditionary Force were pushed to the sea at the resort town of Dunkirk, France, by the sudden collapse of the French army. A character here describes the soldiers, lined up and waiting to be ferried back home, as “fish in a barrel.” It’s more like the machine-gunning of a sardine can. Strafing planes and dive bombers decimated the crowd waiting for rescue.
Nolan makes up a triptych with war’s relativity—time stretching or standing still in the presence of death. It’s one hour with a patrolling Spitfire pilot called Farrier (Tom Hardy, muffled with an oxygen mask—Nolan masked him again, after The Dark Knight Rises). We spend one day with Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), the captain of the pleasure boat The Moonstone, wearing a sweater and tie into the war zone, just one of that motley armada of seacraft requisitioned by the Royal Navy. And we spend a week with some nigh-mute soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles and Damien Bonnard) who have an unspoken compact to escape together. In different combos, these soldiers pose as medics, and then they survive one shipwreck, then another, and then another. Part of their traumatic journey is spent hiding in a ship, waiting for the tide to rise as bullets burst through the bulkheads—it’s as much of a wringer as the scene in Das Boot when the water pressure blew the rivets out like .45 slugs.
If it’s less cohesive than the James Ensor-worthy horror carnival in Atonement (2008), Dunkirk is an ordeal in which every facet is stomach-turning with tension. Nolan’s borrowing from Hitchcock is a series of studies of the cornfield scene in North by Northwest, with a plane’s machine guns taking your measure as they wheel and descend. Hans Zimmer’s slow rumblings—often drowning out the dialogue—winch up the nerves. Hoyte van Hoytema’s photography is an eerie blue-white palette that looks like the afterlife has already begun. The depth of field is especially powerful in the scenes of Farrier’s pursuit of the Luftwaffe planes. I can’t recall a WWII flying spectacle cut with such power. We get claustrophobic in a cockpit, as Farrier tries to reckon his remaining fuel with a smashed gas gauge. It all seems so uncertain: the gilded flicker of the gun sight’s spiked circlet when the sun strikes it, the frustration of shooting and shooting and not striking.
Nolan said he favors action over character, here; in this situation where fleeing or standing fast give you the same slim chances, it’s a movie about who will survive. Rylance gives the most performance with the least material; facing danger on both legs of the trip after he picks up an unstable lone survivor (Cillian Murphy, billed as “Shivering Soldier”). Dawson has the sort of bravery that’s a close kin to shock. At the end, when he wordlessly nods at an obituary in the local paper, one judges that this nod is as much as he will ever say about the war for the rest of his life. Kenneth Branagh, hired for our memories of Henry V, glowers at the horizon line, but there’s little payoff. He ends up playing a war memorial, really, when the film commences its fulsomely elegiac last stage.
Dunkirk misses the grim humor in Len Deighton’s histories of the war, or some other indication of how the Miracle of Dunkirk proves the importance of being lucky over being smart. Churchill propagandized a humiliating retreat as a brave regrouping, in one of his noblest speeches—his words are read aloud haltingly from a newspaper at the end of the movie. Our last shot of a survivor’s look of wonder, realizing the size of the feat. One could just as easily have finished with a caption: “And then, the war began in earnest.”
Every summer, I spend at least one evening at the Boardwalk—usually on a Monday or Tuesday when all of the rides and treats are discounted to $1.50 and the crowds of tourists are thinner. The frenetic lights and sounds and the tempo of thrilled screams mixed with the muted hush of nearby surf nevers fails to make me feel like a kid again—as does giving into a caloric splurge in the form of kettle corn and a corn dog.
But it was the adult me that did a double take as I made my way from the Cave Train to the Giant Dipper and passed a craft beer bar, of all things, by the Log Ride.
I was delighted to recognize cans from some of my favorite local breweries. Whiting’s Foods, a local company that has served concessions at the Boardwalk since 1953, opened Bay Brews in May. Jeff Whiting, associate vice president of operations and fourth generation in the biz, says that more and more people are opting away from mass-produced beer, and they’re excited to be able to work with local breweries and expose their products to thousands of guests. “We’re also training knowledgeable beer masters so they can educate customers about the product.”
Bay Brews offers 13 different craft beers from six local breweries—including the “Giant DIPA” Double IPA by Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing, from its Boardwalk-inspired series—craft cider from Santa Cruz and local wine from Monterey. Beer and cider comes in 12-ounce and 16-ounce cans, or as a tasting flight. They also offer Stubborn Soda, a craft soda made from natural ingredients, Fair Trade cane sugar and without additives or preservatives. The special craft soda machine at Bay Brews is one of only a hundred currently available in the country, says Whiting.
Aside from being far more palatable than a Budweiser, I love being able to sip a local product while enjoying Santa Cruz’s most quintessential attraction. According to Whiting, I’m not the only one: “The other day a guy walked by with a Modelo or some other mass-produced beer that he had just purchased, and stopped in his tracks when he saw this place. He said, ‘You mean to tell me that I bought this when I could be drinking that?’ He gave his beer away to his friend, came in and bought a local beer.”
Although the American-owned Artesana Winery is in Uruguay, the export director for her family’s business, Leslie Fellows, lives locally.
Artesana is a small-production winery specializing in single-vineyard, terroir-driven Tannat and Tannat blends. The 2015 Tannat-Merlot-Zinfandel blend is particularly interesting as Artesana is the only Zinfandel producer in Uruguay. And Fellows says that Uruguay is one of the greenest countries in the world and has the purest vineyard environment on the continent.
“Our 20-acre vineyard is completely hand-farmed using sustainable practices—and our wines are handcrafted with minimal intervention,” says Fellows. “And Tannat has been found to be the healthiest of red wines with three-to-four times more antioxidants,” she adds.
If you have never tried Tannat, then I’m sure you’ll love this rich, full-bodied wine with ripe fruit flavors and exotic spiciness. It’s traditionally paired with beef and grilled meat, but it goes well with a variety of foods. The good news is that Artesana wines can be found downtown Santa Cruz at Soif for only $20, so it would be an opportunity to dine on Soif’s delicious cuisine and pair it with some Tannat.
Uruguayan wines are attracting the attention of both sommeliers and consumers in the U.S., and Artesana’s wines have received accolades from numerous publications, including the Washington Post, and Wine Enthusiast.
Visit artesanawinery.com for more information, or head to Soif and choose some Tannat from their excellent selection of wines from all over the world. I think you’ll exit this wonderful wine store with more than one bottle. Visit soifwine.com for more info.
Summer Craftbar Marini’s chocolate-dipped strawberries will be paired with the wines of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard at the next Annieglass Craftbar. The event is noon to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, July 29 at the Annieglass Studio, 310 Harvest Drive, Watsonville, 761-2041 ext. 21. Visit annieglass.com for more info. And mark your calendars for another wine tasting with Idle Hour Winery from noon to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 6 with winemaker Anne Marie dos Remedios. A small wine-tasting fee is refundable when purchasing wine.
Three of the creative minds behind this year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music—new music director and conductor Cristian Măcelaru, composer Karim Al-Zand, and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie—reveal what the festival will sound like (and why!) in its first year of the post-Alsop era
Cristian Măcelaru
music director and conductor
No one can figure out where all of those years went, but suddenly last year it was time for Marin Alsop to bid adieu to the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music she’d shaped for 25 years. Now a new maestro steps up to the podium to lead the acclaimed orchestra into a new landscape at the edge of contemporary music. On Sunday, July 30—the start of a season bristling with world premieres, commissioned works, composers in residence, and tributes—all eyes will be on a young Romanian-born conductor named Cristian Măcelaru. An ascending star on the international musical scene, Măcelaru (pronounced muh-cha-lay-roo) brings astonishing energy and ambition to his new role.
Born into a large and robustly musical family, Cristian Măcelaru started making music as a child. Already an accomplished violinist when he came from Romania to the United States for advanced studies, he took a Masters in Composition and Violin Performance at the University of Miami, and quickly began attracting a growing network of orchestral assignments. This year alone, he will conduct in Vancouver, Dallas, San Diego, Glasgow, Munich, Seattle, Berlin, Montreal and Denmark, among other venues. Just finishing up his tenure as conductor-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra, maestro Măcelaru takes the Cabrillo Festival podium this week as the new music director and conductor.
At what point did you choose music as a career?
Cristian Măcelaru: I can’t take credit for choosing the career—nothing else was an option! [Laughs.] You grow up feeling that all families played music together. There was never anything else.
I came to the U.S. to study at the University of Miami. For a while, I became interested in physics, and went on a binge reading physics. I was surprised that I could be passionate about anything else. But music—my biggest passion—won out.
How did you go from violin to conducting?
It was really a transition from playing violin to conducting, a gradual merging from one to the other. I was always interested in conducting, and I just started studying it. Soon I was conducting more concerts than performing violin. I first came for the summer to Interlochen Center for the Arts in the frozen north of Michigan. It was a secluded, wonderful place with no distractions. Everyone there was passionate about their art. When I arrived, there was no period of adjustment—it felt like home, surrounded by music.
Is your career where you would like it to be?
I started late for a conductor, at 30 [he’s 37 now]. I feel comfortable with where I am, career-wise. With humility, I have to say that things have moved very quickly. I’ve been very successful. I’m very grateful.Your work is never validated unless someone else endorses it. And that means having an orchestra. I believe that being entrusted with a festival endorses who I am. And this festival has a huge international reach. When Marin announced her departure, all eyes were on Cabrillo—it was a very important venue.
How do the festival’s goals reflect your own?
The Festival has always prioritized discovery, innovation, creativity and exploration.
This is aligned with my own vision. I am always more interested in performing a new piece than in doing the same thing again. Well, I like both, but they involve different kinds of enjoyment. Working with a festival involves problem-solving, requires a very quick response. I find that very exciting. Cabrillo was not a career move on my part, it was simply the perfect fit.
Does your programming favor political themes?
I wouldn’t say political. I’d say that I’m very interested in relevant art. I think a society needs to have a mirror, and art can help provide a mirror that leads to answers. I look for composers that want to create a mirror to our society, and that includes things we should celebrate and not simply negative aspects. It’s very important to me that art remains relevant to the 21st century, and to the community it lives in. So I’d say my programming strives for a balance between the question mark and the smile.
Was most of the season programmed before your appointment?
No, actually I pretty much chose everything on the season schedule. We had to work very quickly. Only the percussion piece was programmed earlier, because you don’t ask Dame Glennie at the last minute! In my mind I had the thought of what I wanted, and then I reached out. Yet it’s an ongoing thing. I began programming the next two seasons, as well. I want to see the trajectory across several seasons, not simply an arrival. Programming this season was informed by the next and the next. It’s a fluid process.
What is your biggest strength?
I like that I constantly search to deepen my relationship with the meaning behind the music. My curiosity! Here’s an example: even though I was in the midst of learning music for several festival engagements, last month someone gave me Lukas Foss’ First Symphony, and here I was with 30 hours of music I should be studying, yet I stopped everything to listen. My curiosity is such a driving force. Learning and discovering excites me more than anything. That curiosity is my best feature. Whether it helps me as a conductor, we’ll see.
Favorite music, favorite composers?
I get crushes on music. When I was a student, I had a three-year crush on Shostakovich. Now I’m all over the spectrum. Sometimes I will get a two- or three-day obsession. Quick crushes. I recently conducted Richard Strauss, and a few days later a Mahler symphony. Can I really choose?
Do you consider yourself to have a specialty as a conductor?
I don’t actually specialize in anything, except learning or performing music. I conduct everything. I’m an omnivore. What keeps me becoming a better musician is this love of all of it—and a refusal to specialize in only one area or another.
Karim Al-Zand
Composer
Born in Tunisia, raised in Canada, and for the past 17 years on the faculty of Rice University in Texas, Karim Al-Zand found inspiration in the shocking and poignant letters of a young Yemeni Adnan Latif, whose incarceration and death in Guantanemo Prison remain shrouded in mystery. The result is The Prisoner, featuring New Zealand bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu, which receives its world premiere in the festival’s closing program. Grammy-winner Al-Zand’s powerful new work sets Latif’s words to dramatic musical exploration, showcasing the celebrated voice of Lemalu.
How did ‘The Prisoner’ come about?
KARIM AL-ZAND: When Cristi asked me to do a piece for this festival I knew where I would look. Like many composers, I keep a notebook of ideas, and I had kept Latif’s letters for some future piece. Cristi gave me free rein and this was it!
Did you have Jonathan Lemalu in mind for the vocal parts?
The singer came during the process of writing it. Cristi has worked with Jonathan before, and since he’s in London, I met him via Skype. We corresponded through email and Skype.
How did you craft the text?
I used Latif’s letters, and then I inserted some other poems to enhance and amplify the emotions, words from Rumi and Rilke. Jonathan and I discussed how the voice would fit in. I created a vocal score first, even before I had finished writing for the orchestra, so that he could begin working on it.
How does the scale of this work compare with your previous pieces?
I’ve done voice with chamber instruments, but this is the biggest thing I’ve done! The finished work is for full orchestra and voice. It was fun, but also a real challenge. There are so many colors at your disposal with full orchestra. And you have to balance the solo voice with the sonic power of the orchestra.
What inspired you?
The letters were first. They’re moving and sad, but also very lyrical. So they seemed somehow perfect for a vocal work.
What do you hope will be the impact of ‘The Prisoner’?
My hope is that it gets people thinking. It’s a bit accusation and a bit lament. Maybe a little of both, and the emotional arch moves between those. This is a fictionalized work, not a documentary, since there’s so much we don’t know about what really happened, what his life was like. It’s the story of a real person. The piece alternates between these letters and the poems, which I feel makes the letters more atmospheric. Narrative and poetry.
Given the richness of the subject, might you consider expanding this into an opera?
Well, it’s still a very fresh piece, but it is very operatic in possibility. Opera is very difficult to mount—it’s the most expensive musical art form by far. But to do it as a full opera … that would be a dream!
Dame Evelyn Glennie
percussionist
Charismatic in approach, wildly disarming in performance, Dame Evelyn Glennie brings both rapture and a rare sensibility to her eclectic approach to percussion. The virtuoso abilities of the Scottish musician have been written for by composers the world over. She comes to Cabrillo next week to premiere Ad Infinitum, a piece created for her by Brazilian singer/composer Clarice Assad (also in residence this season). The collaboration between the two musicians has resulted in a concerto exploring childhood and imaginary worlds, and allows for ample improvisation by the renowned percussionist, who lost her hearing at the age of 12.
When did you realize you’d chosen percussion as a life profession?
DAME EVELYN GLENNIE: Age 15 was when I decided to pursue a career as a professional musician, and made the aim of becoming a solo percussionist.
Was there a youthful epiphany?
No, not really. I had participated in music-making during all of my school days from the age of five to 16. Music was an important part of our school curriculum for all youngsters. A high percentage of people participated in music, so it wasn’t unusual for me to also participate. At 15, I gave serious thought about becoming a professional and tried to weigh up the difference between doing something as a hobby as opposed to a profession.
What instruments did you start with?
I started timpani and percussion from the age of 12. The percussion teacher at school did not allow any of his pupils to specialize, thankfully. Therefore I started with what the school had available: snare drum, two hand-tuned timpani, drum kit, xylophone and small auxiliary instruments.
Percussion can be so intimate or social, it can be sophisticated, complicated, simple, delicate, raw, organic, powerful, fragile—whatever the piece of music requires. — Dame Eveyln Glennie
Do you have a favorite instrument? Your go-to sound?
A: No. Whichever instrument is in front of me is my favorite.
How did you and Clarice go about collaborating on this upcoming percussion concerto?
I saw Clarice perform one of her pieces with the Albany Symphony Orchestra a few years ago, and I loved her work. I then asked if she would mind writing something for me. Email exchanges happened, and here we are. Clarice has a wonderful imagination, yet she writes for the performer by leaving a great deal of room for creativity. She is so very talented.
Is the shamanic element of percussion in your consciousness as you perform?
Sometimes it is, but not always. Percussion can be so intimate or social, it can be sophisticated, complicated, simple, delicate, raw, organic, powerful, fragile—whatever the piece of music requires.
What brings you the most pleasure in performing?
Walking on that tightrope with an audience between stress and relief. Performing always gives you an opportunity to ask questions of yourself and your audience.
About the Festival
The 2017 season of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music runs Sunday, July 30 through Saturday, Aug. 12, and features seven world premieres; 11 composers in residence; a guest appearance by Dame Evelyn Glennie; tributes honoring Lou Harrison’s centenary and John Adams’ 70th birthday; the West Coast premiere of William Bolcom’s Ninth Symphony; a U.S. premiere of Gerald Barry’s “Piano Concerto; Jörg Widmann’s Con Brio”; Cindy McTee’s “Symphony No. 1: Ballet for Orchestra”; and more. Most events are at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. For more details, go to cabillomusic.org.
When Patrick McGrath was 13 years old and living in a group home for foster youth, another kid charged at one of his friends, swinging a skateboard overhead.
McGrath, who was larger than others his age, tried to shield his friend, he says, and ended up taking serious blows to the head, neck, and shoulder, before managing to calm the angry boy and restrain him.
“If I ignored him, he was going to attack my friend using a skateboard like it was a baseball bat, and probably was going to kill him,” he says.
Seven years later, McGrath is an intern for the Museum of Art and History, helping to assemble Lost Childhoods, an exhibit on life inside the California foster care system. The ramifications of that skateboard attack and the group home’s handling of it impacted McGrath greatly, he says, and he worries the conditions that stem from it will leave him with an uncertain future when he graduates from the system at age 21, in a couple of months.
That feeling of being left in the lurch is common among current and former foster youth. Estimates vary,but some studies show that more than a quarter of foster youth experience homelessness within the first few years of leaving the system. According to the recently released Santa Cruz County 2017 Homeless Census and Survey, 27 percent of the homeless population had been through the foster care system at some point. Some try to get out before they are pushed out.
“It’s not uncommon for children to run away from the foster care system, and it isn’t hard to understand why,” says recent UCSC grad Jess Prudent at the MAH exhibit, beside a black-and-white photograph of a foster youth sleeping in a sleeping bag on a park bench. Though she never went through the system, she identifies with some of the exhibit’s troubling themes because she remembers growing up in an abusive home herself.
Cynthia Druley, executive director of the local chapter of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), says that she often knows the foster youth who come through the nonprofit “on a high level”—sometimes in a court docket or piles of paperwork. But the MAH’s exhibit, which will be on display through the end of the year, immerses people in the world of foster care more deeply.
“There was this level of detail and personal information that was so moving for me,” Druley says. “I had two people with me that didn’t know much about children in foster care. We were all in tears. To know what it’s like to not have security. With seven day’s notice, they can tell you they don’t want you in their home, and then you move onto a different home.”
She says foster youth often struggle because they lack the connections that many young people have, which can plague them even after they graduate from the system.
“If the rent goes up,” she says, “they can’t call mom or dad as my son did, and say, ‘Can I come back home?’ Those people become homeless.”
As McGrath nears his 21st birthday, the search for work grows more daunting, as he feels he doesn’t have those networks many people his age do.
He had plans to be a mechanic, and he graduated from Santa Cruz High School with a certification through the Regional Occupation Program to become a general service and Valvoline lube technician, after moving in with his grandma at age 16. He moved away to Sacramento, enrolling at Universal Technical Institute, where he excelled. But once the curriculum got into transmission work, he had to leave because he could not lift the equipment due to issues stemming from his injuries as a teenager at the group home. Eventually, he moved in with his grandmother, Roberta.
Along the way, he’s had several surgeries, in both his right arm and his shoulder, after his old group home had initially tried to cover up the incident for years, brushing it off as scoliosis. Eventually, McGrath’s grandmother and his court advocate managed to track down the hospital records and start getting him care. Since then, he’s had two reconstructive surgeries on his arm and two more on his shoulder.
“I found out in high school there was a chance I could become permanently disabled for my whole life, which there still is,” he says. “I’m trying hard to fix my arm, but it’s a little harder than it seemed at first.”
Part of the problem, Roberta says, is that he hasn’t been able to get any physical therapy through the state’s insurance. “The system covered it up, and the system has kept him from having physical therapy that was needed for him to regain his strength,” says Roberta, who spent her retirement fighting for custody of her grandson.
Meanwhile, legislative reforms are ushering in changes, hopefully for the better. A 2015 law written by Assemblymember Mark Stone aims to phase out group homes, and created a thorough vetting process for resource families—formerly called foster families—that went into effect in January.
McGrath has been taking Cabrillo College business courses, and hopes to someday own a car shop. Still, he worries that if he doesn’t get approved for disability benefits or find work by the time he graduates, he’ll end up homeless. Roberta says because she lives in government housing, he should be able to seek assistance through other avenues.
“I have a core belief that God gives us no more than we can handle. There is some reason all of this is happening to him,” says Roberta. “I do say, ‘All of this will be behind you someday. You’ll understand.’ But right now, he’s feeling like he’s next to nothing.”
Director Tyne Rafaeli has talked about how she wanted Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s new production of Measure for Measure to be an allegory for contemporary politics. I’m not ashamed to admit I was ready to roll my eyes, as many a great playwright—Shakespeare, let’s face it, first and foremost among them—has had his or her classic works butchered in the name of creating a shallow “modern political parable” that either twists the intended meaning into knots trying to make a point, or goes for shallow, broad satire that can make even a timeless work of art feel like a dated hack job.
With that in mind, I have two remarkable things to report about Rafaeli’s production: 1) she doesn’t turn Angelo, the play’s villain, into Donald Trump; and 2) it’s one of the best SCS productions I’ve ever seen—and I’m counting the last couple of decades before the company was forced to switch the order of “Shakespeare” and “Santa Cruz” in its name.
Last year’s inspired production of Hamlet proved SCS is thriving creatively under artistic director Mike Ryan, but Measure for Measure is on a whole other level than that, even. Or perhaps it’s the level of difficulty involved that makes it seem that way; I’ve always found Shakespeare’s tragedies innately weightier and more watchable than his comedies. And don’t get me started on the “problem plays,” which usually play very … er, problematically.
Measure for Measure is one of those, but the typical question of “what’s all this melodrama doing in a supposed comedy” is deftly sidestepped thanks to the incredibly nimble skills of the cast. They can draw you in with an intense build up, nail an out-of-left-field comic moment, and then swing back into the dramatic scene in a way that makes your head spin. It’s a rush, especially watching Rowan Vickers as the Duke, and David Graham Jones as Angelo. Because she has to play it straight the whole way through, Lindsey Rico’s performance as Isabella is more of a slow burn that pays off in the end. But her character’s line that “truth is truth” is the key to Rafaeli’s poignant modernization of the play and its message.
See, I have to think that in 1603 (or possibly 1604) when it was written, Measure for Measure would have been considered, despite its happy ending, a fairly cynical play. After all, when the Duke leaves him in charge of his kingdom, the sanctimonious Angelo, who is willing to have Claudio (played by Kevin Matthew Reyes, who is also fantastic as Pompey) executed for supposed “fornication” (which is really more or less a paperwork glitch), himself attempts to blackmail Claudio’s sister Isabella—a nun, mind you—into sex by offering to spare him if she consents. And yes, Angelo, long a controversial Shakespeare character, can be portrayed as a sadistic fascist, or soulless buffoon, or both.
But you have to see Jones in the scene where Angelo lays out his offer to Isabella. It is a shockingly real and contemporary vision of a man losing his way right in front of his own eyes, and to his own shame. This tragic reading of the character is the only one that makes the reconciliatory ending of the play work, and it’s the only one that would match with the message of Rafaeli’s production. Though its contemporary accessories—black military dress uniforms and jackboots against an effectively stark set and a brilliant mash-up of 20th century decades—give it the air of a dystopian reading, it’s actually the opposite. This is a production about hope, and about bureaucrats, and about hope for bureaucrats. It’s about a system that isn’t broken—even when its leader goes astray. All of the government officials want to do good, especially the cool-nerd Duke (whose disguised movements through his kingdom to try to figure out how to better govern is a political fantasy that is likely to set hearts aflutter in Santa Cruz right about now). Patty Gallagher as the Provost is the government middle manager we all dream of—earnest, steadfast and true. And Tristan Cunningham as Escalus, Angelo’s second-in-command, is convincingly frustrated as she tries to push her boss in the right direction at every opportunity. The state is not the enemy here; it is a blank slate that requires good people to keep it in check and in balance. For the two-and-a-half hours of this play, it has them, and all of the bad decisions of a poor leader are nullified, all mistakes corrected. (I’m not going to say Annie Worden as the comic-relief constable Elbow necessarily represents good government, but god is she hilarious).
Even when Angelo gives in to the lure of “fake news,” layering on ludicrous aspersions of conspiracy to try to save himself upon the Duke’s return, he soon sees the error of his ways. Truth is truth, the play assures us. For everyone. It may not be the Shakespeare play we deserve right now, but it’s the one we need.
‘Measure for Measure’ runs through Sept. 2 at the Grove, 501 Upper Park Road, Santa Cruz. For more details and to purchase tickets, go to santacruzshakespeare.org.
Born in Tunisia, raised in Canada, and for the past 17 years on the faculty of Rice University in Texas, Karim Al-Zand found inspiration in the shocking and poignant letters of a young Yemeni Adnan Latif, whose incarceration and death in Guantanemo Prison remain shrouded in mystery. The result is 
Charismatic in approach, wildly disarming in performance, Dame Evelyn Glennie brings both rapture and a rare sensibility to her eclectic approach to percussion. The virtuoso abilities of the Scottish musician have been written for by composers the world over. She comes to Cabrillo next week to premiere 
