Distance: A Few Steps in a Huge Downpour(?)
Early today because don't know when I'll get back from concert tonight. Enjoying reading the few old articles in The New Yorker re: The Dead. Especially Bill Barich's October 11, 1993 one on Jerry Garcia (Still Truckin'). And here's a passage concerning the Dead in a November 17, 1997 article by Alex Ross on the initiation of MTT as director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra:
None of this quite prepared audiences for Tilson Thomas's raucous first season in San Franciso in 1995. Outdoing even his contemporary-minded colleague at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, he unloaded reams of twentieth-century music and turned again and again to American names. The truly startling development was the two-week American Festival he held at season's end. A marathon concert of avant-garde showpieces was capped by a dissonant jam session in which Tilson Thomas joined surviving members of the Grateful Dead. No one who was there will forget the sight of Davies Hall overrun with Deadheads, or the sound of them cheering Varese's 'Ionisation" and Henry Cowell's "Quartet Euphometri." Most wonderfully, the festival lacked the condencension that so often poisons classical-pop crossover schemes. It was an authentically festive day - topsy-turvy, at times sublime.
Wish I'd known to go to that!
L: Phil Lesh, Michael Tilson Thomas, Mickey Hart R: Bob Weir (1995, San Francisco Chronicle)
No comments:
Post a Comment