Jazz heats up Brewery Arts Center

For those who thought Kenny G wasn't exactly a stellar jazzman, as I suggested last week, here's a group that most surely is jazz at its most imaginative.

The Industrial Jazz Group (with 11 players, but sometime as a sextet) play at the Brewery Arts Center Performance Hall at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25. The night before, they'll play at Moody's in Truckee.

The founder of the band, Andrew Durkin, put the band together when a singer he was backing didn't show up. He handed out some charts, and the Industrial was born.

The title? Hard to match to the music, which is very good jazz (I've listened to three CDs, one of which hasn't yet been released). It's all over the place, from reworked Bach on. As Durkin says a listener told him, "It sounds like Thelonious Monk drunk."

Drunk or not, the Industrial continues the imaginative programming at the Brewery. On the heels of the Gospel Hummingbirds, the Industrial is clearly blazing new trails in jazz.

That's fun.

Tickets are $15 general and $12 BAC members, seniors, and students. Call 883-1976 for tickets and information.

College Culture

Western Nevada Community College's free cultural series, "Faces, Voices & Stories," is Friday, and not to be missed by baseball fans. And it's free."Oh, How They Lived" is about the Negro Baseball Leagues of the early 1900s, and will be narrated by Byron Motley.

Motley will combine his performer-storyteller experience, delivering a lecture and performance that is historical and entertaining.

The show is enhanced by a personal connection Byron has to the Negro Leagues; his father umpired in the leagues.

The special performance is at 7 p.m. in WNCC's Marlette Hall in the Cedar Building, 2201 West College Parkway. Call 445-3324.

Happy Valentine's Day

A "Jazz Sampler for Sweethearts" is Tuesday with dancing at Comma Coffee 8 to 10 p.m. Cost is $5 at the door; $4 for members of the Mile High Jazz Band Association and free for those age 18 and under.

The 17-member Mile High Jazz Band (Sheryl Adams sings) will play jazzy versions of love songs for Valentine's Day and other swinging, big-band selections, plus more modern stuff, like Miles' sheets. Call 883-2662.

From the vaults

"The Human Stain" slipped by me back in 2003, but it's now out on DVD and worth viewing.

It stars Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise, and adapted from a novel by Philip Roth. It is at times gripping, at other times sort of a loose cannon.

The story is that Hopkins has been forced to resign from his college after a poorly thought-out remark. He tells his story of a love affair with a woman half his age to Sinise, a writer. The woman, Kidman with flaming red hair, is married but separated from Harris - who is neurotic, to put it mildly.

Hopkins is fine as always, Kidman handles a difficult role well, Harris is loud, and Sinise cosmopolitan. The story weaves back and forth from the dark past to the current crisis.

This is not a movie for kiddies; the language is rough at times and sex a steady thread. But it's a cast that knows what it's doing and does it well. It's rated R for language and sexual matter.

Then there's last year's Oscar winner, the oddly mistitled "Million Dollar Baby," which may have been shooting for irony, but wound up sounding like a movie musical. This is a fine movie, with Clint Eastwood as director and star and Hillary Swank as the fighter he reluctantly trains.

Morgan Freeman is there as the narrator and common-sense guy. Eastwood has aged into a great stone face as an actor and as a director with a fine sense of the slow fade and cut.

The Oscars this film won were deserved. It's rated PG-13.