Picking Tickets, Spring 2012

Our friend and former Isthmus writer Susan Kepecs writes "Cultural Oyster," a blog that covers performing arts in the Madison Area. Read her spring picks from our theater, below. The full article can be found here.

"The Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (Wisconsin Union Theater, Feb. 4) – the very sophisticated Monday night house band at Manhattan’s eponymous West Village club – has always played honest-to-god jazz. This big band, with its 15 heavy-hitting players, was born in ’66 of the fortuitous collaboration between two forward-looking orchestral jazz giants: trumpeter and composer / arranger Thad Jones, who’d been a soloist with swing king Count Basie, and drummer Mel Lewis, who honed his chops in Stan Kenton’s jazz orchestra. The VJO brought big band jazz straight into the postbop epoch, and despite huge changes in the times and personnel, it’s still true to its own brand of big band swing.

The wacky, whip-smart, genre-busting jazz fusion band Bela Fleck and the Flecktones stops in Mad City (Union Theater, March 1) on its much-touted reunion tour. Banjo master Fleck and the Wooten brothers (“Futureman,” inventor of the drumitar, and virtuoso bassist Victor) have been together since the band’s very first gig on PBS in 1988, but this is the first time they’ve played with pianist / harmonicist Howard Levy since 1992. There’s a new album, Rocket Science (E1 Records, 2011), to go with the tour, though the promo lit implies the band’ll mix new tunes with hits from the three albums they made before Levy split.

Nigerian saxophonist / vocalist Seun Kuti and his high-energy brass and percussion rich big band Egypt 80 (Wisconsin Union Theater, April 12) blew the roof off the WUT on their US debut tour in June, 2007. Kuti told me in an interview then that he’s not as wild as his father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late, legendary king of Afrobeat and revolutionary politics. Maybe not, but like Fela, Seun is the consummate activist, taking the stage in support of myriad African causes. This month he's been in the midst of the Occupy Nigeria movement, performing his take-no-prisoners political songs onstage in Lagos during mass protests against the end of the fuel subsidies that help keep prices down for the underpaid masses – President Goodluck Jonathan’s concession to deregulation demanded by the IMF. A week into the protests Jonathan restored part of the subsidy, but count on Kuti to keep up the good fight. I saved the best – my personal favorite – for last. When the going gets tough, as it will when state GOP challenges to the Recall signatures plus all those right wing corporate-funded ads aimed at the national presidential race heat up, we get the orishas’ blessings, right on time.

Straight from Havana, Sierra Maestra – the group that rescued Cuban son from the dustbins of prerevolutionary history in the 1970s and has carried la musica forward ever since – plays Memorial Union’s Great Hall on March 23. I’m listening to their latest CD, Sonando Ya (2010, SASA Music), right now. It takes me to my happy place, despite the freezing fog outside. Yo soy sonera de corazón – I live to dance to Cuban son. You will, too. Aché."