THE LIST

VALLEY

— GEOFF GEHMAN

The Allentown Art Museum has enjoyed two newsworthy years, first establishing that a long-owned portrait was painted by Rembrandt, then premiering free admission on all open days, courtesy of a local foundation’s legacy gift. Rembrandt’s sublime oil of a lady, once owned by French royals, hangs in the Kress Gallery, which showcases Renaissance and Baroque works donated by a charity launched by Samuel H. Kress, a Valley native and nickel-anddime store mogul who decided that small-city museums deserved big-city masterpieces. The newly rearranged American galleries are brighter and roomier, with more room for pieces by non-whites, nonmen, and non-U.S. citizens. My new favorites range from Kara Walker’s five-act silhouetted drama of a child enslaved to Rigo Peralta’s frame-filling painting of his grandmother smoking a cigar. The best news is a vow to change a third of the 148 American works every six months, the sort of refreshing infusion that prevents a museum from feeling like a mausoleum. (31 N. 5th St., between Linden and Hamilton streets; 610-4324333; allentownartmuseum.org).

Main Street in Bethlehem has a European air and flair. Three blocks encompass four centuries of history, six architectural styles, seven cuisines, and a whopping 15 indoor/outdoor eateries. Strolling, eating and eavesdropping are enhanced by brick-and-slate sidewalks with Victorian lamps and views of everything from an 18th-century blacksmith’s shop to a Latin restaurant that housed a Woolworth’s. Hot spots include Tapas, which serve savory meats, cheeses, and fries dipped in aioli. Cool spots include the brick patio at the Sun Inn, which hosted such dignitaries as the Marquis de Lafayette and, yes, George Washington. The street’s casual buzz ramps up during a host

Rigo Peralta (American, b. Dominican Republic 1970), Doña Negra, 2016, acrylic on linen. Allentown Art Museum: purchase, The Ardath Rodale Art Acquisition Fund, 2019. (2019.7)

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Geoff Gehman is a former arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown and the author of five books, including Planet Mom: Keeping an Aging Parent from Aging, The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the LongLost Hamptons, and Fast Women and Slow Horses: The (mis)Adventures of a Bar, Betting and Barbecue Man (with William Mayberry). He lives in Bethlehem. geoffgehman@verizon.net A.D. Amorosi is a Los Angeles Press Club National Art and Entertainment Journalism award-winning journalist and national public radio host and producer (WPPM.org’s Theater in the Round) married to a garden-to-table cooking instructor + award-winning gardener, Reese, and father to dogdaughter Tia.

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CITY

— A.D. AMOROSI

October is mostly good for one thing only: Halloween. Other than that, it is the month that is NOT autumn’s leafy arrival, NOT Thanksgiving and NOT Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, and New Year’s Eve.

Just saying this makes me wish that the month was over already.

So let’s start at Halloween, work backward, and state categorically that—when it comes to celebrating the spooky, sexy, costumed, candy-filled holiday of All Hallows’ Eve along the east coast—nobody does it better than Henri David. Since the tail end of the 1960s, David’s decadent dressed-up (or not at all) affairs have been the stuff of legend. Mostly due to its host, the twirling mustached David, who lives Halloween every day by serving up tony handmade jewelry from his Pine Street gem salon of the same name and dedicates himself wholeheartedly to the holiday by preparing and making at least four costume changes per party, all without telling a soul in advance. “Not even the people who make my costumes with me know what I’m doing as I keep its secrets close,” says David, who, again this October 31, will bring his annual Halloween Ball to the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown (207 N. 17th St., 215-732-7711). And again, David lives by his Ball’s motto, “Come as you wish to be and not who you are.”

Back to reality, did you know that Post Malone is coming to the Wells Fargo Center on October 6? Why that is fun, even if you don’t have a total lock on what it is he does, is because the rapper-singer with the sketchy, patchy beard and the weirdest Osh-Kosh-Be-Gosh hip-hop fashion sense ever seems to exist on a fluffy cloud with zero edge. Seriously. Listen to songs such as his new hit with Doja Cat, “I Like You.” Even its title seems soft and lame, but sweet nonetheless.

Photo: Al Stegeman (2013), Al_in_Philly

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conversation

A.D. AMOROSI

JAZZ VOCALIST MARIA MENDES

The mood colors the music

Mwith Saudade

MARIA MENDES IS A dreamer. Or so she says in conversation about her newest album, Saudade, Colour of Love. Featuring her breathy, expressive vocals nestled against woozily intense melodies first heard on her spare, Grammy-nominated 2019 album Close to Me—now a new set of intimate orchestra arrangements from the Metropole Orkest—Mendes flits across rhythmic divides and glides through her homeland’s ingenuous indigenous brand of folk, Fado, like a falcon in flight in an elegantly nuanced voice not

“I had long resisted Portuguese folk music. Its mournful, downbeat tone seemed incompatible with my passionate approach to song, forged in operatic training and the spirited jazz improvisation I’ve learned from such formative influences as Carmen McRae, Betty Carter, and Shirley Horn. It took leaving home and putting down new roots in as vastly different a locale as the Netherlands to grant me the perspec] tive to discover a wholly original approach to music in general.”

far from earlier solo albums such as Along the Road (2012) and Innocentia (2015).

“Yes, I am a dreamer, a spiritual person and often nostalgic, but quite optimistic about life and why certain happenings have a reason for their existence,” says Mendes. “I love romance, so my heart tends to listen to and sing ballads.”

Thinking of the differences between singing and acting intuitively and innately—the dream actualized and improvised - instead of setting sights like a sniper and nailing her target, she believes that the two ideas walk side-by-side and hand-in-hand.

“At times, music flows intuitively from me, as a spiritual call on, say, the aspect of writing and composing,” she says. “Other times, it is easier for me to establish a storyline or a specific aesthetic direction for my musical pieces to flow. On stage, all the study and preparation from my instrument and way of listening/feeling music comes alive intuitively, connected dot by dot on the energy that flows from me, my band, and the audience.”

As an artist, much of who Mendes is has to do with location-location-location and how she navigates its metaphorical waters. Although she’s been living in the Netherlands for several years now (due to the Erasmus exchange student program during her time searching to get her Bachelor then Master’s degree in jazz), her connection to Portugal remains strong, especially where Fado is anchored, in the soul of the country. “Bringing together jazz and Fado has been the most important and artistically fulfilling work I have done so far, really feeding my soul,” says Mendes.

Fado has a profound melancholic longing attached to each note and word. This allows her “to embrace vulnerability and celebrate it.”

“Interpreting and arranging Fado has been an awakening for me to connect with this beautiful legacy of my ancestors. I had long resisted Portuguese folk music. Its mournful, downbeat tone seemed incompatible with my passionate approach to song, forged in operatic training and the spirited jazz improvisation I’ve learned from such formative influences as Carmen McRae, Betty Carter, and Shirley Horn. It took leaving home and putting down new roots in as vastly different a locale as the Netherlands to grant me the perspective to discover a wholly original approach to music in general.”

Mentioning as she does some of jazz’s greatest vocalists at the forefront of her inspiration, I can’t help but ask: did Mendes find jazz, or did jazz find Mendes?

“Jazz found me,” she says. “I was destined to become an opera singer. My mother tells me that I firmly expressed my desire to become an opera singer at the age of three. I started studying music and devoting myself to its classical studies in several subjects (voice, piano, history of music, composing, music analysis, acoustic, and choirs) from age 12 onward. When I was 17, I came across an opportunity to record “My Romance” and “Over the Rainbow” in a home studio recording of a friend. Just like that, I learned the songs on the spot and had so much fun singing them. It was a blissful feeling of freedom, and that kick never left. Then I started to dig some lost music treasures I found at home; plenty of Count Basie, Sinatra, and Nat King Cole albums that my father would rarely listen to. It was common to hear Chopin, Vivaldi, and Beethoven at home.”

Walking through the trajectory of her recorded output—how Close to Me leads directly into Innocentia into Along the Road into Saudade—Mendes pragmatically sees her work as an “honest result of the artist and person I was” at the moment that she and her collaborators created it. “As a composer, arranger, and vocalist, I hear the evolution. All of my albums express a true

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conversation

A.D. AMOROSI

REBECCA PIDGEON

How the singer-songwriter, art-pop auteur, found a new focus through yoga,

with Parts of Speech Pieces of SoundOn stage (Speed-the-Plow at the National Theatre, London) and on-screen (Heist, Bird Box), with her clear, cutting diction that leans toward a sneer and her sly, icy stare, actor Rebecca Pidgeon radiates wily intelligence and gutsy gall.

However, on her albums as a singing songwriter, in the folk-ish Ruby Blue ensemble, and recordings such A.D. Amorosi: Pop stars revealing themselves as actors—such as Harry Styles and David Bowie—are almost always revered. Actors making music—think Kevins Bacon and Costner—are often eschewed. Why? Rebecca Pidgeon: That’s sad. What’s funny is how, in the past, artists like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland were praised for doing both and taken seriously for working within both genres. Something’s changed, and people aren’t so used to it these days.

“For instance, everyone knows the mantra ohm. Her impression is that the ohm mantra is the sound of the universe, a primordial sound. That was impressive to me, that the universe is reverberating with sound, like dark matter. And that same sound is reverberating within each of us as well.”

as 1987’s Glances Askances and a solo career that begins in 1994 with The Raven, those same lit-witty smarts are imbued with a richly burnished emotion and poignancy without ever stooping to sentimentality. If wartime Noel Coward and Jeff Buckley ever got together, they might come up with a Rebecca Pidgeon all their own. A.D. Amorosi: You grew up doing both professions at the same time. Rebecca Pidgeon: Yes. I didn’t really choose one over the other. I may have been more active in one than the other at times. The derision? It’s something that you have to live with, I suppose. If people can’t accept you, so be it. You just play to the audience that you have. And I happen to like Kevin Bacon. I played on a bill with him and his brother, their rock band, and they were great.

On her new album, Parts of Speech Pieces of Sound, Pidgeon comes up with another form of intelligence, emotion, and even reverence as the singersongwriter allows her preoccupation with and devotion to yoga take hold of her craft. And with that, she blossoms and opens more than any of her albums passed.

Inspired by yogic scholar Sri Prashant Iyengar and her participation in remote online classes originating in Mumbai during the pandemic, Pidgeon explored the spectral realms, existential equations, and mind-bodyspirit connectivity in ways she had never attempted or thought possible before in yoga. Yet, though it sounds holy, sonically (blame its drones) and lyrically (blame its connection to that which is sacred in us all), Parts of Speech Pieces of Sound does not sound like the calming music of meditation. Instead, it is alive with loops, electricity, and new prayerful ideas.

Tesla would be proud.

ICON’s A.D. Amorosi caught up with Rebecca Pidgeon in Los Angeles before returning to New York City’s Joe’s Pub for the first live showcase of her new album A.D. Amorosi: Your lyrics are always tender, tough, and intelligent. Whether you’re writing from the mind and the body, as you are on your newest album, Parts of Speech Pieces of Sound, or from a place, time, and person as you seem to do through most of your previous songs, you lead with a sense of poignancy in your lyrics, without much sentimentality. Who inspires your writing beyond you taking your own counsel? Rebecca Pidgeon: I admire great lyricists such as Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, try to read as much great writing as I can, and hope that THAT rubs off. I try not to be cliché or sentimental, in my writing, yet I do believe that I often fall short of that wish. I’m never totally satisfied, but I do my best to relay stories or characters that I find interesting. I do struggle a bit with all that.

A.D. Amorosi: Is lyric writing more automatic now, than it once was for you? Rebecca Pidgeon: I have to think about it a lot—writing lyrics. It doesn’t just pour out of me. I’m not someone who journaled my whole life and had that at my

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