Music

[JAZZ]

Written by JESSICA ROGEN

The moment that Victor Goines really got into jazz is seared into his memory.

He was 13 and had only begun to experiment with the genre, imagining himself as a classical clarinet player instead. But there Goines was with a fellow budding musician — his good friend since kindergarten — who put on a record of John Coltrane’s “Countdown” and played along on his trumpet.

“It was phenomenal,” Goines says. “It was really extraordinary to hear him play that and to hear ohn Coltrane for the first time t was a mind-blowing experience that I’ve been in pursuit of my entire life since then. It really ignited the a flame in me

Goines’ good friend? Well, his name was Wynton Marsalis. Yes, that Wynton Marsalis.

Yet, even next to the famous trumpet player, Goines himself is no slouch. Since 1993, he’s been a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis Septet. Until earlier this year, he directed jazz studies at Northwestern University, and he has more than 200 original compositions to his name. He’s also recently been named president and CEO of Jazz St. Louis, stepping into that role earlier this week.

“[It feels] priceless, you know, to have this opportunity,” he says. Goines hails from New Orleans. e first came to music because of his mother — she thought playing a wind instrument would help his asthma. Soon, the medicinal side of music fell away as Goines came to study under a series of great teachers and alongside players such as his pal Marsalis, sneaking into the city’s jazz clubs, such as Tyler’s Beer Garden.

“I was around enough that they started to recognize me and say, ‘Hey, just come on in, man,’” Goines recalls.

He went on to study at Loyola University in New Orleans and then at Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond, Virginia, and is currently at work on a PhD through Boston University. That neverstop-learning philosophy has roots back to a series of great teachers growing up, including his clarinet and saxophone instructor, Carl Blouin, who also doubled as his mathematics teacher.

After high school, Goines asked Blouin about applying for a job as a math teacher. “He said, ‘I don’t know if you will get the job if you apply, but I guarantee you won’t get the job if you don’t apply,’” Goines explains. “And that has been my story about everything that I do. I have not gotten everything that I wanted. But whatever I didn’t get, I always say I’ve made a very good attempt to make sure that it was a strong effort to pursue my particular beliefs and visions.” Goines did go on to apply and get the job, even earning a math certificate ater on, he’d find himself answering bandmates’ kids’ math questions, laughing as he recalls going over 50 of Marsalis’ son’s math homework problems one night after a concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

“I get joy out of doing that, of helping students,” he says. When Goines retired from his teaching post at Northwestern earlier this year, he was looking for something different. He’d been aware of the opening at Jazz St. Louis but didn’t initially intend to go after it.

Then he kept hearing from friends and colleagues — including Marsalis — that he should pursue it, that they’d recommended him. “All these doors are starting to swing in a certain direction,” he recalls, thinking of Blouin’s advice all those years ago. So he applied and got the job.

Goines intends to start out by doing something musicians really know how to do: listening. He wants to know what’s really working and what things can be tweaked to work that much better so that Jazz St. Louis can be improved in the long run.

It’s all about building upon the strong foundations that already have been put in place, he says.

“I would like to elevate the status of Jazz St. Louis to not just being known around the world but being world renowned,” he says, “but at the same time, as is in the mission statement, to realize it’s there to serve the community.” n

Written by DANIEL HILL

Well, it’s official: With the success of last weekend’s Music at the Intersection, St. Louis has a bona fide music festival on its hands.

In the event’s second year — and the first in this particular outdoor format — the fledgling affair proved that it’s ready to fly. The fest saw more than 50 acts performing across four stages in Grand Center within a thoughtful footprint that showcased the city’s urban core, with attendance numbering north of 8,000 people over two days — 4,500 attendees on Saturday and 4,000 on Sunday. The majority of those people were from the St. Louis area, but some traveled from as far as the U.K., New Orleans, Chicago, Memphis and Indianapolis for the event.

It saw a diverse crowd with a wide age range and even a considerable number of families enjoying a slate of world-class acts on a weekend with temperatures in the 70s — by nearly all measures, an ideal set of circumstances for such an event. In the week since the fest wrapped up, the reviews have been consistently positive and the city has been buzzing with excitement.

If the enthusiasm for the fest was palpable among its attendees — and it surely was — it’s equally noticeable in its organizers now that the dust has settled.

“We wanted to make sure that the identity of the festival, the values of the festival, rang loud — and we felt great about that,” says Chris Hansen, executive director of Kranzberg Arts Foundation. “We wanted to see St. Louis elevated, our culture and our musical heritage elevated, and to be recognized by not only our audience members, but all these great national acts coming to town — and we achieved that. We saw the much broader age range. We were very surprised by some of the younger ages that came out for this, and we also were very surprised at how many out-of-town guests came to St. Louis for the festival.”

According to Hansen, even the topbilled artists were impressed.

“The feedback that we were getting from the national acts, from Gary Clark Jr. to Terrace Martin and many more, was they really felt that they were part of something bigger than them,” he explains. “That they were inspired, that they don’t get to see and play in festivals that are as rich and diverse.”

Not since LouFest was unceremoniously canceled in 2018 just days before it was set to take place has the city seen a festival this ambitious. While some comparisons between the two would be easy to make, Music at the Intersection truly has its own identity — that of a unique, smaller-scale festival focused on the jazz, blues, soul, rock and hip-hop sounds that find their roots in St. Louis’ storied music history.

Hansen shrugs off any similarities between the festivals, pointing out that unlike LouFest, Music at the Intersection was 100 percent locally produced and staffed, with a majority of the acts who performed based in or originally from the city as well. “Everything that was created around it serves St. Louis,” he adds. As far as he’s concerned, the only similarity is that the new event is also a major festival in the city with big names on the marquee.

“Here’s the bottom line: This doesn’t look like a LouFest. It’s not a commercially based event,” he says. “It’s a boutique, identity-based festival. It’s rooted in our heritage. LouFest didn’t celebrate our great legends. It didn’t have tributes and legacy acts like this. No, we’re not at all trying to recreate that. It had its time and its place, and it served the community well for a festival for a long time.”

Going forward, Hansen says organizers intend to maintain the festival’s St. Louis-centric identity, with just a few tweaks. They plan to expand the SXSWstyle “Intersessions” conference with workshops and panels led by local and national influencers in the fields of music, art, technology and business. He believes they could tighten up and improve the VIP experience in future years as well. The programming will remain the same, with a slate of artists that occupy the space where jazz, roots and blues music meet with more modern hip-hop, rock and neo-soul sounds.

Hansen says they also want to grow the festival, but they are committed to not doing so too quickly — they want it to come into its own organically, and they recognize that unforeseen problems could arise if they went too hard too soon. The festival’s footprint this year was widely seen as one of its greatest strengths, and it could comfortably handle another 1,000 attendees per day, by Hansen’s estimation.

“Bigger isn’t better on this one,” he says. “We want to make sure we execute something safe, something that everyone feels comfortable in, and that really celebrates our urban core.”

In all, though, Hansen and the rest of Music at the Intersection’s organizers know that they have got a hit on their hands — and they don’t plan on messing around too much with a winning formula.

“We’re going to hold on to a lot of the things we did this year because we got resounding feedback that it worked,” Hansen says. “We’re going to listen to the feedback that’s more critical about the things that didn’t work and try to improve upon those things. And we’re going to continue to sustain this festival. The goal of this festival, the promise of this festival is to be generational — something we bring our children to, and something our children bring their children to.” n

[LABOR RELATIONS]

For Workers, By Workers

Written by JESSICA ROGEN

The audience at this weekend’s Bread and Roses Missouri’s Workers’ Opera: Our Stories United Will Never Be Divided will see a sketch about Kias being stolen. But the plot wasn’t ripped from the headlines.

Rather, it came from cast member Monica Bohlen.

It wasn’t too long after their apartment building reduced security that Monica and her husband Theotis “Theo” Bohlen’s Kia was stolen. But it wasn’t only them. About 10 cars from their apartment’s lot soon were gone.

“It was getting so bad that every night, at least three cars were being stolen off the lot,” Monica Bohlen says. “Management wasn’t doing anything about it.”

She started a petition and circulated it to her neighbors, getting the attention of management, who soon wanted to meet with her to discuss what could be done. The process made her realize how important it was to speak up for herself and for others.

Bohlen shared that story with Delaney Piggins, the writing facilitator tasked with helping the cast craft the script for the aforementioned opera, who wrote it into the script.

“That’s what I really love about Bread and Roses: They are talking about things that’s going on, right here in the city, and not just talking, but reaching out and, you know, making people aware and lending a hand,” Bohlen says.

Telling the often-untold stories of the region’s workers is the whole point of the production. read and oses a nonprofit founded by St. Louis’ legendary labor organizer Joan Suarez with a mission to support and celebrate workers and their families through arts and humanities programming — started producing operas in 2016 to create original theater “by workers, for workers.”

This year’s production has three showings this weekend at the Gaslight Theater (358 North Boyle Avenue, 314-380-0174, breadandrosesmo.org/event/workers-opera_event). It’s directed by St. Louis’ Mariah Richardson, a prolific playwright who wrote last year’s Shakespeare in the Streets production The Ville: Avengeance! and is a writer and voice on the forthcoming animated PBS TV show Drawn In.

Though it’s called an opera, the production is actually a series of shorts that include music, theater sketches and comedy. The cast wrote the script in a two-week period with Piggins’ help. There’s a parody of Family Feud, songs rewritten to be pro union and workers’ rights, and personal storytelling, such as one sketch that tells a cast members’ struggles to get to work at Home Depot during July’s flooding

The cast is made up entirely of volunteers, and not many have previous theater experience.

“In March, I couldn’t have told you who was going to be in the cast, and now that we have these nine people, they just seem like the right nine people,” says Emily Kohring, executive director of Bread and Roses. “They’re just all wonderful in different ways, and they’re all bringing a lot to the process.”

The actors found the Workers’ Opera in different ways, some by chance, others were involved with a previous Bread and Roses production or they were recruited by other cast members.

Theo Bohlen, for example, was recruited by his wife. After her car was stolen, he’d taken to driving her to practice. Then she suggested that he join himself. ’ve been in it for the last five weeks, and I love it,” he says. “Oh, God, I love it so much. It’s something new to me. So I’m very impatient because I’ve been working for 25 years, just physical work. So this right here is something I’ve been looking for, how to explain — it’s not work.”

He works for the Missouri Department of Transportation, and Monica Bohlen retired from education because of vertigo — she drove a school bus and then became a special educational assistant. So aspects of the process are new and somewhat di cult, memorizing lines in particular.

“I got my lines pretty much,” Monica says, laughing. “But, you know, for Theo, I’m telling him his lines … he’s up there saying his lines out loud, and I have to restrain myself.”

Doing the opera together has brought them closer, given them something to work on together. When Monica sees Theo — or any of their fellow actors — struggling with a line, or something else, she says she empathizes.

The experience has bonded the whole cast, and they have even met outside of o cial rehearsal to practice, something that the Bohlens point to as evidence of not only their unity but also the power that comes from being able to share your own stories.

The Bohlens are looking forward to doing that this weekend.

“It makes us feel like we matter,” Monica says. “I hope everybody comes out.”

That, Kohring says, is the point.

“I hope it raises a great discussion,” she says. “I think all the best theater is theater where people talk about it on the drive home and talk about what they saw and what it meant to them and what new ideas they got.” n

Attend the Workers’ Opera: Our Stories United Will Never Be Divided at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 23, and Saturday, September 24, or 7 p.m. on Sunday, September 25, at the Gaslight Theater. Admission is free but reservations are recommended. Visit https://bit.ly/3w6iWTD to make your reservation.