Cloud Surfing

San Rafael Swell – DG and Satoshi Ueda 10/13/06 Eddie’s Attic, Decatur GA

River and Drown – DG and Mark van Allen 10/13/06 Eddie’s Attic, Decatur GA

Vassar’s Dream – DG and Joe Craven 10/14/06 Melting Point, Athens GA

Videos shot by Nancy Lewis-Pegel

I’ve been a fan of Stew‘s music since my friend and colleague Barry Smolin turned me on to The Negro Problem a decade ago. The man is a true genius of pop music, funny and smart and full of sharp observations of humanity.

All of Stew’s and The Negro Problem’s CDs are worth seeking out, but my favorite is Stew’s The Naked Dutch Painter followed by TNP’s Welcome Black. (Follow those links to hear audio samples.)

Last night I saw Passing Strange at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. It’s a musical play, with Stew and a band onstage with the actor/singers. It’s based on Stew’s life, growing up in LA and living in Amsterdam and Berlin before returning to southern California. The songs are awesome, of course.

Here’s an interview with Stew that appears in the program and also on the Berkeley Rep’s web site: a song big enough to run around in – well worth a read!

Robert Hurwitt’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle is pretty positive, but I think he missed a few things. “What he hasn’t done [] well, though, is fill out his central figure. Youth seems to become more passive in his travels, soaking up experiences without showing us much of his internal journey.” I disagree: you see and hear the character absorbing everything that happens to him, and by the time he gets back to LA he’s learned some very important things about love, life, and music.

My favorite songs in the show are “Amsterdam” and “We Just Had Sex.” Parts of “The Drug Suite” (from The Naked Dutch Painter) are used in the show, and so is “Come Down Now” from TNP’s Joys and Concerns.

I’ve been a Berkeley Rep subscriber for more than thirty years (with a break of several years in there). The company has presented some terrific works, including several world premieres. Passing Strange is a co-production of BRT and New York’s Public Theater, where it opens following the end of the Berkeley run. It’s here through December 3, and I recommend it very, very highly.

UPDATE: Just got some review excerpts from the BRT publicist:

“sometimes an artist’s reviews are so hyperbolically positive because there’s some fire under all that smoke. Take Stew, for example, who has created a piece of musical theater titled Passing Strange that paints an alternately uproarious and heartbreaking picture of the black experience from suburbia to bohemia… if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your butt to Berkeley, plant it in a seat, and be wowed by one of this generation’s greatest talents.”—SF Bay Guardian

“Stew rocks, yo! Musically, the singer/songwriter serves up one hot dish with Passing Strange…It’s the archetypal hipster-coming-of-age tale…the score is smokin’. Full of funkadelic feel-good anthems, it slides from punk to rock to blues like a good party mix…There is no end to the smart-aleck wit in this play”—San Jose Mercury News

“It took nearly 40 years, but we finally have the first coming-of-age-in-the-’60s play that truly gets it right, with all the sex, drugs, radical politics and angst intact … Passing Strange expands the possibility of what musical theater can be…Stew leads a five-piece band, circling the stage through a score that defies you to remain motionless in your seat… a sparkling, engaging and highly entertaining show.” – Contra Costa Times

“an engaging coming-of-age story, told with the energy of an art-rock concert…clever, tuneful songs keep its pulse racing, in comic and unexpectedly affecting passages…It’s a portrait of the artist as a young bohemian whose spiritual awakening [is] a musical epiphany…As a song cycle, it’s technically impressive…As a play, it’s an entertaining travelogue…With the band cooking—on every form from gospel and blues to punk, cabaret, soul, minstrel, calypso and performance art—Stew sings in a powerful, flexible voice as comfortably capacious on a tender ballad as it is energizing in a down and dirty blues growl.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Make no mistake, this is a terrific show…a musical in the guise of a concert…pulsates with the sounds of pop, rock, funk, punk, gospel, folk and New Wave…Stew and Rodewald create music that feels authentic—a rarity in this world of shiny, corporate musical theater.”—Oakland Tribune

“A pleasingly wayward young man’s odyssey… Strange is a lot like a live concept album… a vital, imaginative production [that’s] full of hilarious set-pieces, catchy songs, witty lyrics and dialogue… choreographer Karole Armitage contributes pop-culture riffs to a show that rarely sits still.” – Variety

“Stop reading right now and buy tickets to Passing Strange before it heads to New York…If more new musicals looked like this, we might yet see a revitalization of Broadway.”—SFist

The Rex Foundation web site has a big story on Tule Elk Park Child Development Center in San Francisco, where my wife is a teacher. Rita is interviewed, along with the site manager and other colleagues. It’s a wonderful story about a wonderful school. We are grateful to the Rex Foundation for its assistance over the years, and to Mary Eisenhart for a splendid story and photos.

Rex: How do you decide what to study?

Hurault: Everything comes from observing the children and seeing what it is they’re interested in. We’ve all gotten very good at having our ears to the ground and seeing “Well, what is it they’re following now? Could this be a study?”

For example, at the beginning of the summer we started to notice lots of ladybugs in the alder trees, and the kids kept coming up to Ayesha and me saying “Ladybugs, ladybugs! Look, look!” and we knew right away that OK, we’re going to study ladybugs this summer. It was right there in the children’s hands.

Site manager Alan Broussard:

…we use a project approach; it’s an inquiry-based method based on a framework where we support children to learn about the things that they’re interested in, and to go in depth.

That is a very big contrast to the old-school rote learning method, and a very large contrast to what exists in public education today, because we’re in quite a conservative environment that’s very skills-based. There’s not a lot of thought being given to supporting children’s critical thinking skills, or analytical skills, or social-emotional skills, the kind of things I think the Fortune 500 companies are actually looking for.

The way we want kids to learn is to go one mile deep and one inch wide. Traditional education is one mile wide and one inch deep. We really want to support kids to peel those layers back, and to support them to ask the questions. It’s all about asking the right questions, because that’s what’s going to support their growth.

Ayesha Ereclawn:

The new 3-year-olds are learning from the 4-year-olds and the 5-year-olds. Everybody’s teaching each other about what’s OK to do in the garden and what’s not. There’s a whole mentality here of taking care of nature; all the staff signs onto it. It would not be doable if it was just me saying it, but it’s coming from everybody.

You hear the kids now, telling each other “Hey, that’s nature. Don’t step on that ant; don’t pull all those leaves off that plant, you’re breaking that plant.” So they’re watching each other almost more than we’re watching them, which is really nice.

Rita Hurault:

The kids in my class going to school are transforming their worlds. Right now one of our feeder schools is digging up part of their asphalt to create a garden. It happened because the parents are aware of this environment and what is happening here, and the teachers there became interested in what is possible. There’s a growing movement to have this kind of environment for urban children. The sidewalk is sort of cracking, and the grass is coming through here and there.

BTW, Rex has two benefit concerts on the calendar: November 18 in NYC with the New Riders, and December 1 in San Francisco with the Rhythm Devils.

The Atlanta airport was a mess – ground and air – on the day I flew home. I took this picture while stuck in traffic trying to return my rentacar.

Weather was bad all over the eastern half of the country, so lots of flights were delayed or cancelled. My flight to Denver was delayed by three hours, and the ticket agent was advising everyone in line to “fly another day.” Denver and Oakland were clear, so I said I’d rather fly to DEN now and stay overnight there if necessary (my manager lives there). He tapped on his keyboard for several minutes and then handed me a card showing a Delta nonstop ATL->OAK. “You can go to Denver if you really want to,” he said. Heh.

I may have been the only person in the airport whose travel day was improved by the nasty weather. Despite a delay of nearly two hours on the Delta flight, I wound up landing at OAK at just about the time I was originally scheduled to arrive.

My boarding pass was flagged for extra TSA annoyance, but even that wasn’t much of a bother. My exit row seat turned out to be the front row of the coach section of the 757, so I had all the legroom in the world.

A nice lagniappe at the end of the best tour ever.

Buddy Cage and Mark van Allen, originally uploaded by dgans.

My best tour ever got even better after a truly amazing MagnoliaFest: on Tuesday, October 24 at Smith’s Olde Bar in Atlanta, I had Mark van Allen with me for my opening set and then I sat in with the New Riders of the Purple Sage later in the evening.