Paris & Points Further Out!

Sunday, August 14:
Paris Portraits at 2:30 / Outfest! at 4:30

Gertrude Stein’s Circle evoked in a monologue based on Harriet Lane Levy’s Paris Portraits

Manning / Pilorz combo featured in our Outfest! sequence of “free jazz” concerts

Get your hiking on Mt. Tam done early, and let Stern Grove slide this week, ’cause we’ve got a couple things you shouldn’t miss…

All the town’s agog about the Stein Collection exhibit at SFMOMA, the Picasso exhibit at the De Young, the Stein exhibit at the Jewish Museum… and along comes Harriet Lane Levy, who traveled with Alice B. Toklas to Paris in 1907 to join the little crowd of California ex-pats revolving around the salons of Gertrude, Leo & Michael  Stein.  By her own account, Gertrude soon set to the task of trying to get Harriet to go home, and leave Alice with her!  In any case, Harriet, whose memoir 920 O’Farrell Street has long been an important piece of writing about early San Francisco, set to writing about Gertrude and her “circle” once she got home, resulting in the piece recently published by Heyday called Paris Portraits.  Harriet’s account is brought to life at Bird  & Beckett in a one-woman show by Laura Shepard, Events Director of the Mechanics Institute Library, staged with the consummate help of Kathleen Blake.

Then, at 4:30 we head out from Paris, not to the banlieues on the outskirts of town, but way further out, with L.A. rocket scientist/tenor sax titan Chuck Manning and SETI astrophysicist/Glen Park resident/trombonist Stu Pilorz, joined by bassist Ollie Dudeck and drummer Omar Aran.  They’ll be way inside the jazz canon for good stretches, but hold on to your hat when they reach for the “out” side of the music.

We’re calling this combo the Chuck Manning/Stu Pilorz Outfit…  It’s all part of Outfest!, our ongoing 5-week sequence of “free jazz” concerts happening every Sunday from the end of July through to the end of April.

Two more Outfest! shows in August after this one: Bishu Chatterjee’s “Time is Now, Not Money” and Rent Romus’ “Lords of Outland”— to be followed by a soft landing, and an exquisite one, with Anthony Brown’s Asian-American Jazz Trio on the first Sunday of September…