December 7 Will Be A Day of Music

One last reminder that Lidia Kaminska (accordion), Jennifer Curtis (violin) and Michael Mizrahi (piano) will be performing works of J.S. Bach, Scarlatti, Piazzola, and several contemporary Russian composers on December 7, 3:00 p.m., at the Trinity Center, 22nd and Spruce Streets, near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Tickets are available here. You can find more details and links below on my July 16 and 23 posts.

Earlier that day, Settlement Music School will be celebrating its 100th anniversary with a live broadcast from the Park Hyatt in Philadelphia. Details from the School's website follow:

Settlement 100 Sunday Brunch and Live Broadcast, 11am-2pm, Grand Ballroom, Park Hyatt at the Bellevue, Broad and Walnut Streets

Featuring performances by alumni, faculty and students, and interviews with distinguished guests. Broadcast live on WRTI-FM, the Sunday Brunch celebrates the Settlement 100 – a roster of 100 interesting, diverse and unexpected individuals whose Settlement experience helped shape their lives.

Featuring performances by:
Settlement 100 Honoree Joseph Anderer, French horn
Settlement 100 Honoree John E. Blake Jr., violin
Beth Levin, piano
Teresa McCann, piano
Leah Mellman, piano
Settlement 100 Honoree Diane Monroe, violin
Reginald Pindell, baritone
Jeffrey Uhlig, piano
Myer Schwartz Advanced Study Piano Trio
Rosalie Magen Weinstein & Matthew B. Weinstein Advanced Study Woodwind Quartet
Gail W. Snitzer Advanced Study String Quartet

Tickets: click here or call 215-320-2686. Tickets will be mailed ahead of time.

An All-Star Jazz Jam Benefiting Settlement Music School

This year marks the centennial of Settlement Music School, the nation's oldest and largest community school of the arts, providing musical instruction to over 15,000 people of all ages at six branches in the Philadelphia area. Since 2005, I've had the honor of chairing Settlement's board. We're celebrating our first century of service to the community -- and revving up for our second century -- with a series of public events, a major fundraising campaign to secure the School's future, and an all-out effort to reconnect with former students and connect with music lovers who should know about the School.

The next terrific event in our centennial year is a concert by the Settlement Music School Jazz All-Stars, under bandleader Joe Sudler. All of the artists either taught or were taught at Settlement Music, and we're so grateful they're coming back to help us to celebrate. Featured artists include:

George Allen, Jr, trombone
John Blake, violin
Tony DiSantis, trumpet
Duane Eubanks, trumpet
Matt Gallagher, trumpet
David Gibson, drums
Bob Howell, tenor sax
Leonard Nelson Hubbard, bass
Randy Kapralick, trombone
Kevin MacConnell, bass
Craig McIver, drums
Dave Posmontier, piano
Wallace Roney, trumpet
Jaleel Shaw, alto sax
John Simon, tenor sax
Wayne Smith, trombone
Louis Taylor, alto sax
Sumi Tonooka, piano
Jose Vidal, trombone

These great performers will come together on Sunday, November 16, at 3:00 p.m. at the Independence Seaport Museum, Penn's Landing, in Philadelphia, and a reception with the artists will follow. Tickets are $20. Call (215) 320-2686 or order online.

Settlement has given the world some terrific artists in every genre of music, from jazz guitarist Kevin Eubanks of The Tonight Show to pop star Chubby Checker, from soprano (and star of the great suspense film Diva) Wilhelmenia Fernandez to the above-mentioned Leonard Nelson Hubbard of hip-hop pioneers The Roots. And the School has at least one alumnus on every major symphony orchestra in the United States. I'll have more to say about Settlement and how important it is to the future of the arts in Philadelphia in a later post.
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Oboomer

As a boomer (and proud of it), I take offense at the assertion by various commentators (among them Gail Collins in The New York Times) that our President-Elect is not part of the boomer generation. Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961. That means he was part of the "second cohort" of baby boomers, born between 1955 and 1964. There are 76 million Americans who make up the boomer generation, including the President-Elect. Three boomers -- Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (both born in 1946) and Barack Obama -- will have served in the White House. I am confident that two of them will be remembered for their successes in war and peace and for their pragmatic and effective centrism.

Bond... the Real James Bond

I'm a latecomer to 007. I didn't pay much attention during the Sean Connery and Roger Moore years, and only started paying to see Bond films when Pierce Brosnan stepped into the role. I never read Ian Fleming's novels until, for some reason, my son became fascinated by them (and by Agatha Christie mysteries) when he was about eight years old. The Bond novels became part of our bedtime reading, usually between releases of Harry Potter books (though I expurgated Bond as I read aloud). I do think Daniel Craig's reinvention of Bond in a darker vein is a triumph, and I will be in a neighborhood theater when Quantum of Solace premieres in the U.S. next weekend.

Last week, I learned about the connection between Ian Fleming's hero and my neighborhood of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. James Bond was an Oxford-trained ornithologist who worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (America's oldest science museum). Bond lived near the Philadelphia Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill. Fleming was a fan of the Caribbean and of birding, and Bond's "Birds of the West Indies" was by his bedstand when he was casting about for a suitable name for his fictional secret agent.

Bond worked at the Academy for some 60 years. According to a WHYY radio interview last week with an Academy executive, the real James Bond met the real Ian Fleming exactly once -- at Fleming's Jamaica escape, "Goldeneye" (which gets a lovely write-up in an article about Fleming and Jamaica in this New York Times article this weekend). During that visit, Fleming reportedly inscribed a copy of his novel "Goldeneye": "To the real James Bond from the man who stole his name." I am also reminded that the real Bond's birding book makes a cameo in the movie Die Another Day as Pierce Brosnan flips through it while visiting Havana. (Guess I missed it - must have been distracted by Halle Berry's emergence from the sea.)