John Flynn, Willem Breuker Kollektief, Lee Shaw, Wintergreen

By Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 19, 2000)
- It’s hard to believe it’s a weekend in mid-May, so many are the opportunities to hear great live music this weekend in and around the Berkshires. Several performers will be making their area debuts; others are celebrating the release of new recordings. Others are just worth going to hear no matter what the reason.

The Guthrie Center in Great Barrington kicks off its third weekend of concerts at Alice’s - or is it Arlo’s? - Church tonight with a show by the Berkshire’s own Bobby Sweet. On Saturday night, Philadelphia singer-songwriter John Flynn makes his Berkshire debut.

Flynn is a versatile songwriter perhaps best known for his children’s and novelty tunes such as “A Manatee Sneezed on Me.” On his eponymous album he flexes his writer’s muscles on tunes about more serious fare, including eating disorders, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Like Bobby Sweet, Flynn is a rootsy performer with a country bent, and he should please fans of precursors like John Denver, James Taylor and Jim Croce. His album includes guest appearances by Dar Williams, David Broza and Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell, as well as a radical reinterpretation of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.”

Over at Club Helsinki in Great Barrington, Boston-based reggae/ska band Pressure Cooker performs tomorrow night. Perennial Boston Music Awards nominees in both reggae and ska categories, the nine-piece band has been together for three years and plays original songs in a classic, early-‘60s style of Jamaican roots music, spiced with snatches of dub, rock steady, Afro-Cuban and jazz.

Jazz pianist Lee Shaw, an Oscar Peterson protégé who is the Capital District’s answer to Marian McPartland, brings her trio to Great Barrington’s Castle Street Café tomorrow night at 8:30. A recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., Shaw has been hailed by National Public Radio as “one of jazz’s premier pianists,” along with Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland.

The Oklahoma native began her career as a jazz pianist at Mr. Kelly’s, a club in Chicago where she shared the bill with such jazz greats as Anita O’Day, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and Roy Haynes. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s she performed in a trio with her husband, Stan Shaw, a jazz drummer.

Lee Shaw was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 1993, joining such other jazz greats from her home state as Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, Charlie Christian and Ruth Brown. She has been an adjunct faculty member of the College of Saint Rose in Albany since 1982.

The Berkshire folk trio Wintergreen are what Peter, Paul and Mary would be if they were truly a folk group and not folk popularizers. Alice and Larry Spatz have been performing folk music since the early 1960s, coming out of the same Greenwich Village folk scene as their better-known peers, but they’ve stuck to the music’s grassroots. Between them they command at least eight instruments and a repertoire that spans traditional and contemporary folk, original songs, dance tunes, work ballads and ethnic music.

In Wintergreen, the husband-and-wife duo team with vocalist and hammered dulcimer player Jared Polens, who also performs with a capella vocal quartet Northern Spy. Wintergreen has recently been awarded grants from the Pittsfield Cultural Council and the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire to present three, free public concerts celebrating the New England folk tradition of ballads, work songs and dance tunes. The shows will feature old and new songs on a variety of traditional folk instruments including hammered dulcimer, guitar, double bass, mandolin and bowed psaltery. The programs are educational as well as entertaining and intended for audiences of all ages.

The first of Wintergreen’s three upcoming performances takes place tomorrow night at 7:30 at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Pittsfield. The final two shows are Sunday, June 18, at 4 at the Mt. Greylock Visitors Center in Lanesboro, and on Thursday, July 20, at 7, at Western Gateway Heritage State Park in North Adams.

Over at the Iron Horse in Northampton, the Willem Breuker Kollektief, a Dutch avant-garde jazz ensemble, makes a rare U.S. appearance tomorrow at 7. The group recently released a new CD, “Hunger!” (BVHAAST), on its 25th anniversary.

The 11-piece ensemble’s music has aptly been described as Duke Ellington meets the Marx Brothers. A typical piece, such as “Vuurpijl,” nods to circus music, Kurt Weill, Philip Glass, klezmer, Gershwin, Prokofiev, fox-trots, and Mark Dresser all in a matter of a few measures. Aside from its original compositions, the group also assays versions of Chopin, Rossini and the Tin Pan Alley standard, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on the crazy-quilt pastiche that is “Hunger!” Composed music is rarely this antic and improvised music is rarely this visual; the Breuker Kollektief scope.

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