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.
The Silverbow Bakery in downtown Juneau is closing. For 18 years, the eatery has been a popular gathering spot for locals and visitors. It’s known for its cookies, soups and sandwiches and, of course, its bagels.
Nicky Love, 30, is a longtime Silverbow Bakery customer. She’s been coming here for most of her life.
“Silverbow is definitely something I think of when I’ve been away and think about home,” Love said.
You can find Love at Silverbow two to three times a week. On this day, she’s seated at a corner table, typing on a tablet. Several others in the dining area are doing the same.
“I’ve been a fan of the breakfast bagel with sausage and egg and cheese and it’s huge and messy and filling. I think I’ve had that almost every time I come here,” Love said.
Love has memories of getting lunch here as a high schooler. As an adult, “I can come here with my kids now and they have somewhere fun to play. It’s kid-friendly environment.”
Love considers Silverbow an integral part of Juneau’s fabric. She’s in shock that it’s closing.
“It’s taken a minute to sink in. I’m going to be really sad to see it go,” Love said.
Silverbow owner and operator Jill Ramiel says she’s heard similar sentiments from other customers.
“It has been fantastic how many people have come out and been emotionally distraught about it. And I was like, ‘Wow, I had no idea that bagels had such an impact on people.’ Or people say, ‘My kids grew up here,’ and then I say, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s been way too long. I’ve been doing this too long,'” Ramiel said.
Ramiel is originally from New York and went to school in Seattle to study architecture. She worked in Juneau the summer of 1996. She says Juneau was missing a place to grab a quick lunch.
“And a bagel place was what I grew up with. You eat bagels every day after school. It seemed like the most normal thing to me. I didn’t realize it wasn’t the most normal thing for everyone in Juneau at that time,” Ramiel said.
Ramiel bought a historic building on Second Street and renovated it. The bakery opened in June 1997.
Over the years, the Silverbow has hosted art exhibits, Alaska Folk Fest singers, movie showings and World Cup events. Ramiel and her husband Ken Alper also operate the attached Silverbow Inn.
“We still own this building and we still live above it and we’re still raising three kids in this community and we still run an 11-room hotel, so we have no plans to leave,” Ramiel said.
Ramiel is putting her energy into another business venture, Juneau Legacy Properties. She and her business partners want to transform a historic Juneau building, like she did.
“When I look back, that’s really what I liked the most was taking something that maybe is dilapidated or maybe it’s underutilized and making it fresher and newer and having new energy put into it,” Ramiel said. “And so we’ve been looking for a building to buy and I would love to add more hotel rooms, or apartments and residences. There’s a lot of options.”
Ramiel is going to miss being a part of people’s everyday lives. But she won’t miss the long, endless hours.
“Because our operation functions 24 hours a day, my bakers work all night long and things go wrong all the time. So I’m looking forward to one solid night of sleep,” Ramiel said.
While the Silverbow Bakery is closing, what it’s most known for isn’t going away. The business taking over promises to carry on the bagel tradition.
An equal rights ordinance that divided Anchorage before failing in a ballot vote is expected to easily pass the city Assembly this week.
The ordinance was originally introduced by South Anchorage Assembly Member Bill Evans and was modified with input from Downtown’s Patrick Flynn. It adds sexual orientation and gender expression as categories under which city residents are protected from discrimination in housing, at work or at public facilities.
Evans works as an employment lawyer and has seen a small number of discrimination cases the new law would cover. But because gender and sexuality aren’t protected by discrimination law, incidents aren’t reported when they happen.
“The intent was to make a statement about what is appropriate or inappropriate in our community,” Evans said of the ordinance. “That statement is that in Anchorage in the 21st century. Discriminating against someone on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity isn’t acceptable.”
The modified version of the ordinance leaves in language for ministerial exemptions, a way of giving some latitude to religious institutions in employment issues. Some feel the exemptions go too far; others say they don’t go far enough.
Though public testimony at Tuesday’s Assembly meeting is expected to be heated, most of those watching city politics expect the measure to pass overwhelmingly.
If it does, Anchorage will become the first city in Alaska to put full protections for gender and sexuality into law.
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:
