After retiring from a 30-year career as an English and language arts teacher, guitar player George Gress has become a guitar maker.
Gress uses Alaska woods, collaborates with his family and a local carver, and has sold guitars to people across the country.
Alaska jazz composer and trumpet player Yngvil Vatn Guttu kicks off the Alaska Original concert series Thursday @360. She’ll be joined by the Rob Cohen Trio, which includes Juneau’s Rob Cohen on piano, Alexei Painter on bass and Clay Good on drums. Guttu says she is excited to play with the guys.
“We agreed that we’re going to really go for it. We’re going to be fearless but not stupid, as in the sense we’ll just want to play together,” Guttu said.
Guttu was born in Oslo, Norway, but has lived in New York, London and Toronto, and now calls Homer and Anchorage home. She says her jazz has been affected by all of these places. Drummer Clay Good says collaborating with Guttu and her eclectic style has been fun.
“Here we are faced with some really great compositions — really challenging compositions that we’ve had a chance to run through before Yngvil got to town, but mostly just to scare ourselves by trying to play them. Her pieces are formidable and it’s really exciting to be given the opportunity to take a stab at them for sure,” Good said.
Not only will the concert be a collaboration with the band, Guttu says the audience is in on it too.
“I think this is a cool chance for everybody to get together and try to experience being in the same space together when we make music. And that’s what we need an audience for — we need people to come and give us nonverbal feedback. When you listen you’re doing a lot more than you think. You know, we who play music we feel how our music strikes you and it’s a kind of nonverbal feedback,” Guttu said.
Listen to Guttu’s full Juneau Afternoon interview with examples of her music here:
The concert begins at 7 p.m. Thursday in the @360 studio at KTOO.
Tickets at KTOO.org.
Monday at 3 on a Juneau Afternoon, Scott Burton hosts.
He’ll speak with Bruce Van Duse about the Polaris House;
Rachel Wintz from AWARE will talk about volunteer advocacy training, and nominations for Women of Distinction.
And he’ll speak with jazz composer Yngvil Vatn Guttu about her Alaska Originals concert with the Rob Cohen Trio on Thursday night.
Those interviews, National Native News, Writer’s Almanac, Bird Note, music and more on a Juneau Afternoon.
Tuesday on A Juneau Afternoon Ben Brown Hosts
We’ll get an update on the Zach Gordon Youth Center with Jorden Nigro;
The Mudrooms team will be here to tell us about their season premiere show on September 9th;
Hannah Stephens and Sophie Lager will tells us more about Who’s Your Diva;
And Juneau educators will tell us about the proposal to open a STEM charter school.
That, Writer’s Almanac, Bird Note, music and more, today on KTOO-NEWS-Juneau. If you miss the live show, it’s also available at 4 on KRNN, and on-line at ktoo.org.
It’s been seven years since Perseverance Theatre has done Shakespeare, but that’s ending this week as “Othello” opens. Director Tom Robenolt and Jamil Mangan sat down with me on A Juneau Afternoon to talk about the play.
Listen to the the 11-minute interview here:
Robenolt says the play is about the outsider.
“The entirety of the title is called ‘The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice,’ and when he writes the ‘Moor of Venice’ he’s saying the outsider of Venice. And that it’s easy for somebody who is the outsider to be vulnerable and manipulated and that’s exactly what happens in this play,” says Robenolt.
Othello is played by Jamil Mangan who you might recognize from his performance as Joseph Asagai in Perseverance’s 2012 production of “A Raisin in the Sun.”
“It’s almost every black male’s dream role to play Othello. To have this opportunity. It’s so great that Shakespeare, being ahead of his time, wrote a character like Othello, a main character who happens to be yes, of African descent,” says Mangan.
Despite being written in the 17th century, Mangan says the play tackles themes that are still relevant today.
“It’s relatable today, the play, in that we often fear what we don’t know, or don’t really understand. And here is this individual, like Tom said, was the outsider and at the same time was a man that everybody revered but then also feared to integrate within their society. And so it’s interesting how some of those … social issues, we’re still plagued with those today,” says Mangan.
The play officially opens Friday at 7:30 p.m., but you can attend a pay-as-you-can performance Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.
Are you part of an arts organization? Need a grant? Three very important people in the national and state arts advocacy community recently talked about what they are looking for on A Juneau Afternoon.
As part of her visit to Alaska, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu visited Juneau on Tuesday. She met with staff and actors at Perseverance Theatre, visited the Sealaska Heritage Institute, and attended a reception at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center.
She also joined Alaska State Council on the Arts Chairman Ben Brown and Executive Director Shannon Daut for an interview on A Juneau Afternoon. Here are some highlights:
Listen to the entire 9-minute interview here:
