Boston Public Radio Podcast
Best Of BPR 9/20: LMF James Carter & Leopoldstadt
Today:Saxophonist James Carter is back in town for two shows Saturday night at Scullers Jazz Club. But first, he and his band swing by the BPL.And, Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt is on stage now at the Huntington. We speak with director Carey Perloff and actor Rebecca Gibel about the play, about a Jewish family in Vienna at the rise of the 20th century.
- Broadcast on:
- 20 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Support for Boston Public Radio comes from Massachusetts Maritime Academy, the Commonwealth's leadership university. They offer a hands-on learning environment, helping to prepare their students to be global leaders in careers on land or at sea. maritime.edu I'm Jim Brodling and I'm Marjorie Egan. This is the best of Boston Public Radio, a new daily podcast from GBH, featuring our favorite conversations from our three-hour radio show in under 40 minutes. Don't panic. If you love filling your phone with episodes of our full show podcast, you can still find it anywhere you get your podcast, or just catch us live on 89/7 GBH, starting at 11 o'clock. Today on the podcast. Incredible saxophonist James Carter joins us here at the library for live music Friday ahead of two shows at Scholars Jazz Club tomorrow night, his first club show here in 12 years. We'll talk with Carter and longtime jazz broadcaster, Steve Elman, and a Tom Stoppard-Sliapostat is on stage at the Huntington until mid-October, concerning a Jewish family in Vienna at the rise of the 20th century. And here's the show. [Music] Last time Detroit native James Carter was in Boston. He was performing with a little known band called the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Five years later, he's back for his first Boston club show and at 12 years, two sets tomorrow night at the legendary Scholars Jazz Club. He's going to be joined in a couple of seconds by Boston broadcaster, music critic, huge James Carter fan, and co-author of Burning Up the Air's great biography of essentially the inventor of our talk radio format, Boston radio host Jerry Williams at Steve Elman. Before we get to talk to these gentlemen, James and his two friends are going to play for us, here they are. [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] James Carter and friends, James, can you join us? Wow, gentlemen, that was fabulous, just fabulous. First set of Boston shows in more than a decade, one that only two shows tomorrow night at Scholars Jazz Club, more info at scholarsjazz.com, that was just awesome. Tell us who did your band? Of course, on Hammond B-3. Hammond B-3. Give it up for Mr. Gerard Gibbs. [Applause] On the multiple percussion set, the drums keep that love going from Mr. Alex White. [Applause] The guy was unbelievable, so tell us, you started very young. Almost every musician in here that's really great, like you are, started really young, so how did it happen? Well, to begin with, I'm the youngest of five. I have two brothers and two sisters. We're all musically inclined, so I came late in the genealogy, so to speak, about 12 years after my older brother, Kevin. And by that time, of course, my siblings basically had their own musical identities, so I was just picking up and absorbing like a sponge. I had the very fortunate pleasure of having my brothers take the musical end and just go into the professional aspect of it. They had a cover band by the name of Steinheim back in the '70s, which also featured some soon-to-be P-funkers by the names of Shirley Hayden and Jeanette Washington, who would later go on to play Parliament Funkadelic. And the band basically covered everything from hauling notes to Grand Funk Railroad, Grand Central Station, Tower of Power, and of course, P Funk and Isaac Brothers. So I had all this growing up, and I was just that sponge, and I was that pest that was trying to grab on all the microphones and try and get a say and get into the mix and all until I got called out, and that's how basically, you know, I came up in that end. You know, James, we're going to talk more about your playing in a second. I heard you yesterday with Jared Bowen, our colleague on the Culture Show. You sounded like the most well-adjusted adult I've ever heard. Is that you or is that an act? Are you seeing so comfortable with yourself, so content with your skills and your life and your family? Is it real? I hope? Yes, very. He does provide. God does provide. That's incredible. So Steve, what's your obsession with this guy? Well, about six or seven years ago, my wife, Joanne, and I heard James for the first time, and we looked at one another after the first set and said, "This guy gives great show." And so what we needed to do, to look around in the city of Austin and see how come James hasn't played here in five, six years. And times gone by, we saw him with the BSO, as you mentioned, when there was a huge standing ovation of people brought James back after hearing the Roberta Sierra, this excellent concerto, and they brought him back on stage in a very moving solo version of "Lift Every Voice and Sing." And people just went nuts. So we said, "He's got to play another club date. What can we do to help?" I did a little job-owning. I talked to the folks at Scholar, and they were kind enough to book James for this Saturday night. And they said, "Well, we might need a little help with publicity." And so my wife and I, again, put our heads together and said, "We might be able to handle some of that." And they said, "Well, he could be doing Boston Public Radio." So we could support the- It's my favorite show too. Transport the instruments here. And he could have a little bit of extra publicity, and so we hired one of the best publicity people, Sue Eau Claire, to do that work. And I'm so glad to say that tickets are selling very, very well. You know what I asked you was, "Why do you like his music?" You know what I mean? He's- He's hard. All right. All right. The simple answer is, again, I'll draw from my wife, Joanne. She said, "James Carter is to the saxophone. What Jimmy Hendrix is to the guitar." Well, I interrupt to say, "Sax is my favorite instrument, but I just know I love it." I never heard certain sounds like I just heard from you, and I was listening to you a lot last night. I am hearing things that I don't hear with other people who are playing the sax. Am I not? No. Probably not. No. So what is it? Is it technique, or what is it that makes you- It's all the above. I always like to say that I'm a frustrated guitarist. And because of my brother to that, and his heroes were Jimmy Hendrix and Carlos Santana. So I like the spirit that electric guitar or anything electric brings to the mix. It gives it another- it gives it another life. And thank heavens because of the musical equipment that I've been adorned with, the various saxophones in particular, the mouthpieces. Because the mouthpiece basically is the external voice box of your own identity. So whatever you feel that you can hear and sing, your mouthpiece should be able to do that, and therefore be able to externalize it to the audience. What's your relationship- I mean, what's a player's relationship like with his instrument? His relationship is- it's the outward appendage, it's like the extra arm, it's the extra leg, it helps them to become mobile, it helps them to express themselves in a way that normal, conventional voice wouldn't allow themselves to do. So it's you, it's an extent- it's you. Yes. It's you. Very much so. Beautiful. So before James goes back to play again, Steve, you were talking about something called slap tongue and circular breathing and a lot of- what's that? What's that going to do with the performance here of Mr. Carter? I like to say that James plays the entire history of the saxophone. In addition, he can go back to the days of Coleman Hawkins in the 20s. He can play the slap tongue as a technique where the tongue is used to create a sort of percussive sound on the, on the reed. And that was something they used as a circus effect in the teens of the 20th century. But- Actually, if I may interject here, it was the principal tone production. He knows the history much better than mine. It was the principal tone production. When you look some back to the recordings of the teens in the 1920s, most of the time that you hear an individual playing, I know I'm not a mic, but you know- That's fine. Okay. You know, you hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the way to keep the- push the time and the playing ahead. So it wasn't just a percussive effect per se. I mean, it became percussive when it started being used, like let's say, in cartoons, for example that. No. Yeah. Thank you. As for circular breathing. As for circular breathing. This is a technique that a lot of saxophonists use, but nobody, nobody I've ever heard does it as smoothly and as beautifully as James does. Where you're playing, and at the same time you inhale through your nose as you're playing and forcing air out through your mouth so that there's a continuity of sound that is a stream and it is not possible if you're going to have to take a breath every couple of seconds. So you're about to return to your bamets. What are you playing this time, James? We're going to play a- first off, the first tune that we played was Matthew G composition. Matthew G was a trombonist in the '40s. He was one of the minor composers of BOP melodies and whatnot. That was entitled O.G. The tune that we're going to play now is from Billy Strayhorn, and it's our take on his "A Flower is a Love Some Thing." So you want to put your headset gently down and return to your most definitive. Oh, okay, you're going to hear another song from James Carter and his trio. They're going to be playing two shows tomorrow night at Scholars Jazz Club. For more info about tickets, scholarsjazz.com. That's Scholars S-C-U-L-L-E-R-S jazz.com. Of course, it's on the river in Cambridge. And let me just say again, as scholars, it is a wonderful, intimate venue. You really feel like you are right there with these players, and there's nothing as we said. Like our great buddy Brian O'Donovan said, like a lot of music, and these guys are amazing. So in a second, we're going to hear Flowers "A Love Some Thing." James, you ready? Let's do it. One, two, three, five. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Last year, Playwright Tom Stoppert won the Tony Award for Best Play. This is 76 annual Tony Awards for Leopold Stuck. One year later, the show is robbed in Boston. Thanks to the great team at the Huntington Theatre Company. By the way, Margie and I happened to bump into Tom Stoppert. At Tanglewood in 2019, he was kind enough to sit down with us for a couple of minutes ahead of the world premiere of the play. And L'opie, here's a little bit of sound between me, Margie, and Tom Stoppert. What do you feel less anxiety now than, as you said, you used to? Why? He's got a million awards. He's got a million awards. I don't know, freakin' one of the great players. It still seems really important that everything should go right on the night. You know, you get older, you get more kind of fatalistic or something. So I'm still a bit worried on the very first. It's not the first night. It's the first audience, because that's when you find out the best and the worst. We were in awe to tell you the truth. We're joined now via Zoom by the Huntington's Leopold Stuck director, someone with a little more than a fleeting connection to Stoppert. That's Carrie Pirloff. Carrie, it's great to meet you. Thanks so much for being here. And you might recognize our other guest from one of my great experiences in the Prince of Providence at the Trinity Rep a few years ago where she played Buddy Cianci's wife brilliantly. And she just recently appeared in the Oscar Best Picture winner, Kota, and has done a million other things. Rebecca Gible is with us at the library. Becky, it's great to see you. I'm so glad to be here. I'm a huge fan of you. Yeah. Oh, thank you. That means we feel good. Thank you. Their terrific show runs now through October 13th. For more information and book tickets, you can go to HuntingtonTheatre.org. It's theatre with an R.E. HuntingtonTheatre.org. Welcome to you both. Thank you so much for being here. And Carrie, do you mention that you knew Tom Stoppert? There are a couple of injuries in my life where I really humiliated myself. And one of them was with him because I was kind of drooling up there. But tell us about your very long relationship. What's the deal? Well, I directed the first production of Arcadia out of England, out of New York. When I started running the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, I was very young. And we developed a kind of epistolary relationship. I wrote to ask him a question and he wrote back a very funny reply. And so we got to know each other and he wanted to meet when I was in London. And so I met him at the bar at the National Theatre. I was just as nervous as you all were until he walked in. And then I thought, oh, I know you. He felt like my family. He's a Central European Jew who fled. And then I said, Zlyn Czechoslovakia in 1940, my mother was a Viennese refugee who fled Vienna in 1938. So we immediately bonded. We shared so many things, a love of the classics and ancient Greek and useless knowledge and all kinds of things. So I directed about 13 of his plays over 25 years. And he always came to work with us. So I'd been in rehearsal with him a lot and got to know him really well. And he got to know my family very well, including my Viennese mother who wrote an amazing memoir called the Vienna Paradox, which he read. So as Tom started to learn about his Jewish past, which took him a long time to piece together because his mother was very traumatized by their escape and then didn't want to ever talk about it again, he used my mother's memoir in part as he was researching what became Leopoldstadt. So it's very moving to me to work on this play because of my love for him, my long relationship with him and my own family history. You know, Becky, I read in the Globe that he zoomed into the first rehearsal. What was that like? I mean, it was looking through time and space at a man whose work has influenced my training and my identity as an artist hugely. It was surreal. Why don't you want to be in this play? I think you may have just answered the question. Why did it matter to you to be in this play? Well, as a European mutt Jew myself, my family story parallels this in stunning ways as well. So I think that this is the story that is closest to my people's history that I've ever had the privilege of telling. Would you have this as an impossible task? Would you spend a few seconds? Well, a few seconds not. And tell the story as best you can. I don't mean with every detail, but can you describe the story? So the story starts and it's beautifully. He's stacked at all. Time stacks on top of each other all in one apartment. So we start in 1899 in Vienna in the Jacoba, which is, I'm sorry, no, the Meritz's apartment, here we go. And then we time travel from 1899 to the '20s to the '30s and then the '50s. And you see not only the physical space of the apartment change as the world falls apart around them, but also it's a cast of about 20. And by the end, that is transformed as well. You know, by the way, cast with a lot of kids. We'll talk about that in a minute. Who are fabulous, by the way. Just fabulous. But you mentioned, Kerry, that Stoppard's mother was traumatized and want to talk about this experience, but this is autobiographical to a large degree. So just explain a little bit about how Stoppard came to understand what exactly had happened to his family. Yeah, I mean, he fled when he was two and they didn't flee as refugees. They fled as workers of the Bataschu factory. His father was a Jewish surgeon at the factory. And the factory relocated them crazily enough to Singapore where his father volunteered. It got very dangerous. The war in the Pacific happened. And his mother then was put on a ship with Tom and his older brother, Peter, headed for Australia that got rerouted and went to India. Meanwhile, his father got killed in the war in the Pacific by a Japanese gunboat. Stoppard didn't even know his father was dead, but he hardly remembered his father. He was only two. And his mother remarried a British colonel who was neither interested in talking about Jews or in any way sort of acknowledging their past and said that he would bring them back to England if they sort of drew a page over there. Past and started over, and that's what happened. So he grew up very proud to be English, learning English as a second language, but writing it better than anybody ever has, pretty much. And then when he was older, he started, he asked his mother a lot of questions. She didn't want to reply. He started going to Czechoslovakia because he got to know Vatslav Havel and was very involved in the Velvet Revolution and coincidentally met at one time, a cousin of his. Who had walked through a glass door when she was a little girl and cut herself. And it turns out that Stoppard's father had stitched that wound and when he touched her scar, all the grief of his history that he had never thought about or dealt with. Finally, welled up in him, and he began to feel culpable that he had gone around saying what a charmed life he'd led when, as it turned out, his entire family was gassed. So he then began to ask that cousin and other people to come and talk to him, anybody who was still alive. They came and brought the family tree that Becky's character Rosa gives to the Stoppard character Leo in the last scene of the play. And he began to dig into his family and what had happened to them. He went to the synagogue in Zilin where his family name is inscribed on the wall. And slowly, he began to put the pieces together. But of course, by that time, almost all of them were dead. It's really heartbreaking. He writes with total self-awareness and honesty. It was a little embarrassing and shameful that I didn't know all this. We mentioned the big cast. It's a huge cast. I think I was trying to count. What is it? Like thirteen adults, seven kids. Am I right? Eight kids, but four on each night. And they think you can't. Eight kids. What's acting in a huge ensemble deal? Well, we used to do this often years ago. And then the pandemic happened. And for so many reasons, budget and health and all of that, everything got small. And to be in this, it's a mosaic of humanity that manifests on stage, but also off. It's thrilling. It's thrilling. You know, Carrie, when I was a kid, I starred in Cowboy on the Moon. I want you to know. And I was incredible if I say it. The reviews were spectacular. It's my school play. I often find kid actors so precocious and so offensive that I want to leave. I'm sorry for that. Probably some say. They were fabulous, these kids. What's it like as a director working with little ones? Well, you know, I ran ACT for 25 years. And one of the great things about ACT is we had a brilliant young conservatory led by Craig Slate, who took young actors very seriously and understood that their storytelling ability was as deep as an adult. They just came at it in a different way. So I love working with kids. We took their journeys very seriously. This is a very intense play to be in as a child. We wanted to make sure that, you know, in this scene in 1938, when they are terrorized by a Nazi, that they knew that Sam Douglas, who plays that role, isn't the same as his character. And he was so generous with them. But Carrie, have you seen Sam do his tap in and out with all the kids? And shake with each kid to make sure that they're okay before and after the show. It's amazing. But it seemed really important that there were children because one of the things, the most beautiful line to me in the play is when Nathan says to Leo, nobody is born eight years old. And yet you go through life as if you cast no shadows. So Tom puts young people in. And often he did this in cost of utopia. It's true in the real thing because he's really interested in how do we reckon with our past and how do generations ever know about their histories. And if their parents don't tell them how do they learn it? So in a way, for these children in Boston at this moment, and many of them are Jewish children, to be in this play is profound and is a huge part of their own family history. That's a voice of Carrie Pirloff. Let me just say the director of the upholge thought at the Huntington Theatre through October 13. And one of the actors, Rebecca Gible, is with some sort of it. Can we be saying? No, I've started and wrote. No. I watched them do the entirety of scene eight in the thirties off stage and watching those children listen with such specificity and attention is stunningly beautiful. You know, when you're speaking of the finals, Carrie just used the word "intense," which I would say is the understatement of the century. It is intense. The final scene is not intense. It's intensity on steroids. And you're the center of that final scene. When you all, when the show is over and you all went to the stage when I saw it, I think on Wednesday night, I'm not sure what night I was there, you seem to be really still affected by what you would just, was I reading something in order? No, you're not reading into it at all. It's an interesting thing. In drama school, they teach us so, so intricately how to get into a character. And it's only now that the training is catching up and starting to teach people how to get out of that emotional experience. And I'm still figuring it out because I didn't learn that. So that's exactly right. And you also talked about your own family history. I mean, this must have caused you to maybe think about your ancestors as well. Absolutely. Carrie mentioned Tom's family names being on that synagogue, the synagogue wall, and my family names are on that synagogue wall as well. So feeling that I'm standing on top of all of that history and having the opportunity to represent it and carry it forward is a huge privilege and responsibility. You know, Carrie, I'm assuming you saw Leopoldstadt on Broadway. And there was an audience there that was obviously pre-October 7th. And now there's an audience here. How do you think, I'm sure you've thought about this, how do you think the audience consumes this play differently? Considering what happened between the Broadway opening and the Boston opening. It's such a great question. And I would say two things. First of all, we are absolutely doing this play as Americans playing Viennese. So we're not using British accents like they did on Broadway. The neutral, if it's two Viennese people speaking to each other, is our own voices. So it's real people talking to each other. The central argument of the play, which is handled so brilliantly in that first scene by Nail Nasser and Fredos Bonjie as Herman and Ludwig, is the question of assimilation versus Zionism. This is the beginning of Theodore Herrick's book, Juden Stopp, The Jewish State, which was written in 1896, in which he argued that Jew hatred is run so deep, is such an ancient thing that it's never really going to go away. And the only way for Jews to ever be safe is to have their own country. Herman disagrees profoundly and says, in 1899, this is the best time for Jews ever in the history of Europe. We're 10% of the Viennese population, but we're 60% or 70% of the artists and doctors and journalists, and we just have to keep assimilating. And the question then comes October 7th, then two horrifying things happen. First, we as Jews realize that we're not safe even in Israel because terrorists are always going to want to destroy the state of Israel. And the second thing is that no matter how we think we've assimilated into either American culture or European culture, that we are somehow always viewed as the other. And so that dialectic is really complicated and upsetting and important, and I think the arguments that Stoppard puts in this play have really been heightened by the events. So we try to, the play is not didactic. It does not point a finger, it doesn't make a point, but it really shows you the conflict that has happened with Jews from the beginning of the diaspora. You know, I probably should have asked this at the beginning, but better late than never, and either of you can answer this. For people who don't know Tom Stoppard, we talked about when we were up at Tanga Wood, head of the premier of Penelope up there, talk about him in the world of being playwriting. He's a legend, and just give us a sense of how he's a big deal. I mean, you know, he, aside from Harold Pinter, I would say, who's no longer with us. And I just, I wrote a book about working with the two of them. Oh, wow. You know, he's, there is no other writer like Tom Stoppard. His imagination is unbelievably capacious, and he confused together topics that you would never think would fit together in one play. Like chaos theory and Byron and landscape architecture in a painting where Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty and rush spies in half good. I mean, he has that kind of imagination. What I would say, having known him now for 30 years, is he has an enormous heart, which is really, he's very shy as a human being. So his verbal dexterity is in a way a kind of smokescreen to protect his own vulnerability. He is, you know, because he's a displaced person who's never really been in his own skin in any country. He writes a lot about loss, about the loss of culture, about his deep belief in art for art's sake and in useless knowledge, you know. And it annoyed me that when the real thing came out, people said, "Oh, finally, Stoppard has a heart." Because he has an enormous heart, an enormous wit, and you have to mind those two things. You know, and I would also say, he's a writer for whom language is erotic. And the plays are very sexy and very cerebral, and the sex and the intellect go together. And that's what's so much fun about them. So by the way, I don't know if you knew he's a big deal. Do you hear that Becky? He's a big deal. So what's your reaction to Margry's question about Stoppard? I would say, God, I feel like I'm still, I'm getting a master class, not only from Tom, but also Carrie working on this play. And the interconnectedness and intricacies of the cerebral and the physical and the heart and the gut is stunning. I don't think I've, I don't know that I've ever worked on a playwright that fuses those simultaneously so gracefully and also so miserly. 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