Spotlight Theatre presents this remarkable concert one night only, February 21,2003 at 8 PM. All tickets are $10.
"'God bless Henry. He lived like a rat.'" So starts the 13th of John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs, the tome for which the late poet justifiably won 1965's Pulitzer Prize. Those 77 sonnet-like poems, along with 300-some more that Berryman later published, constitutes a seminal, uniquely American documents of high gallows humor and harrowing despair--a document of which I am extraordinarily fond. So I expected disaster when an unreleased CD by pianist-composer Doug Davis setting 14 of Berryman’s Dream Songs to music recently crossed my desk. But Davis, who’s director of Composition and Jazz Studies at Cal State Bakersfield, has a real ear for the poet’s shaggy rhythms and an artful, dramatic touch; his inventive setting, employing a solo piano, jazz trio and chamber ensemble with operatic tenor, are quite wonderful and exceedingly well-suited to Berryman’s text. Blusey, playful and malevolent, with strong overtones of Bartok and Berg, the music is jarring, creepy and slyly seductive. And the disc, which I found compulsively listenable, is both appropriately unsettling and a hell of a lot of fun. With bassist James Dethlefson, drummer Kyle Burnham, and tenor John Gerhold.” Brant Reiter, LA Weekly, August 30 – September 5, 2002
