Countless legendary performers and composers are alive and well in Ivory and Gold's expansive repertoire.
When Jeff Barnhart, a ragtime and traditional jazz piano virtuoso, and his wife Anne, a classically-trained flutist, got married in 2000, one might have thought the sectarian differences between the faiths of jazz and classical music would prevent this Connecticut couple from ever hitching up in a harmonious professional musical partnership.
If you thought from a musical perspective they’d be an odd couple, you would have been totally wrong. The devoted husband and wife have also wedded their diverse musical talents into a dynamic chamber duo called Ivory and Gold.
Jeff, a keyboard savant, stokes the piano’s ivories with Fats Walleresque jazz energies as Anne creates classical-sounding, but now quite jazz-influenced golden tones and molten phrasing on flute.
With Anne, edging her way into jazz through the spiritual guidance afforded by Jeff, the Ivory and Gold duo alliance has happily morphed into a musical marriage in a jazz and classical heaven. It’s a merger yielding high-quality artistic success with their interpretations of ragtime, trad jazz, swing, blues, Broadway hits, American Songbook gems, and an array of classy musical surprises. Fats Waller, Scott Joplin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Hartford’s own Sophie Tucker, and countless other legendary performers and composers are all quite alive and well in Ivory and Gold’s expansive repertoire.
Home for a brief stay in their only appearance in Connecticut in 2015, the Barnharts present their musically polished show at 5:00 pm on Sunday, April 19, at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek at 55 East Kings Highway in Chester. Tickets: $25.00 available in advance by calling (860) 526-8920. Information: cbsrz.org.
“We want to connect with every audience we play for no matter what kind of music they usually listen to,” Jeff said by phone from Mystic. “We refuse to call ourselves a jazz duo, because that’s merely a part of what we do. We’re not a ragtime duo, nor are we a folk duo. We’re all those things and more. There’s such a panoply of great things in the quilt of American music, which is so rich with so many colorful squares that we can just grab from it at will and treat it all as equal music.”
While the chamber duo exudes jazz bravura and classical finesse, don’t for a moment expect traditional concert hall formality to be the order of the day. Both instrumentalists also sing and like to banter between songs. Jeff, a humorist, often recounts amusing anecdotes about musical lore. “We have a dynamic show that is not a concert in the standard stereotype where we show up; we bow with great gravitas; we play our tunes and sort of squint at the audience, go on to the next tune, finish up, bow again, and then quickly leave,” he said. “That’s not who we are.”
Besides a bumper crop of unpretentious, artistic quality over the years, the Barnharts’ professional musical marriage has also yielded industrial strength statistics. Under the banner of Ivory and Gold (a name they’ve trademarked), the barnstorming Barnharts have, since 2001, recorded eleven albums together and presented thousands of performances on six of seven continents.
As missionaries of “eclectic Americana,” the two Connecticut Yankees (Jeff was born in Meriden; Anne in New London) pride themselves on being not only musicians, but also entertainers. They devoutly believe that their audiences should enjoy themselves as listeners and viewers every bit as much as they do as performers.
What brought the jazz and classical couple together? Ragtime.
Increasingly in recent years, Ivory and Gold has performed frequently around the nation at upscale jazz house parties, presented in the intimacy of mansions and ocean-view homes.
What first brought the jazz and classical couple together as a collaborative unit was ragtime, the common ground for the duo’s starting point. With her strict classical background, ragtime was the ideal first step for Anne because all the music is written out on the page. Equally important, there’s no call for improvisation, which is the fundamental creative challenge in jazz. With her conservatory training and classical music degrees, Anne had played only notated music. “I could read ragtime and Jeff already knew it,” she said of using Scott Joplin as a mutually viable jumping off point.
“Classic ragtime at the Joplin level of musicality has one foot firmly in the jazz tradition with its rhythms, but really, in its form, harmony and structure, is truly classical music,” Jeff said.
From that first step, Anne said of her evolution into a jazz improviser, overcoming the fear of not reading something off the page was next. “It was just about loosening up and allowing yourself to be freer and to think on your own,” she said.
Jeff has a much more humorous, fanciful way to describe how Anne came about to her conversion from classical to jazz player, referring to the famous fairy tale about the release of the tower-bound, long-haired Rapunzel. “I just said, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ She did. And I dragged her from the ivory tower of classical music into the swamp of jazz,” he said.
Officially, Ivory and Gold made its premiere appearance at the Sun Valley Jazz and Music Festival in Sun Valley, Idaho. “It was great. Scary but great,” Anne said. “Up until then, I had only performed in classical settings where the audience is a significant distance away from you, and is usually sitting in the dark in a concert hall. But this, in dramatic contrast, was held in a little room and upstairs in a hotel. I sat right next to the baby grand piano that Jeff was playing on. The audience was literally sitting at my feet. I couldn’t even move without stepping on somebody.”
Now Anne thrives on exactly that kind of intimacy and direct connection with the audience that seemed so alien back then. “I don’t like it when the house lights are dark,” she said of the kind of intimate rapport and ambience that have been inspiring her for years now. “I don’t like not being able to see the audience. I don’t like it when they’re too far away. You know, they’re as much a part of the whole performance as we are.”
Spoken like a true improviser who now plays in the moment and thrives on the sound of surprise, a far cry from the Rapunzel in the lofty classical tower.
Catch of the Day
The Al Fenton Big Band, an 18-piece ensemble, serves succulent swing, jazz, blues and ballad specials as the catch of the day at 7:00 pm on Thursday, April 16, at J’s Crab Shack, a seaside-themed but urban restaurant harbored at 2074 Park Street in Hartford.
Fenton, the band’s founding father, has stepped down from the podium, turning over the baton to alto saxophonist Kathy Neri, a band member since its inception in 2004.
A native of Chicago, Neri, a veteran of area bands and combos, is a graduate of South Windsor High School who has earned undergraduate degrees and a masters in music from the University of Connecticut. The band’s new maestro is an instrumental music teacher in the East Hartford school system. Admission to the big band clambake is free. Information: jscrabshack.com and (860) 231-9545.
Antithesis Sparks Synthesis
Innovators with very different stylistic approaches, guitarists Nels Cline and Julian Lage transform their divergent views on sound and strategy into positive assets with their bold duo explorations on Room, their acclaimed 2014 Mack Avenue Records release.
If anything, the duo’s seemingly contradictory string theories have had a catalytic effect on one another, inspiring the antithesis of antipathy with highly charged results, a chemical reaction the experimental pair demonstrates at 8:30 and 10:00 pm on Friday, April 17, at New Haven’s Firehouse 12, 45 Crown Street. Tickets: $20.00, first show; $15.00, second show. Information: firehouse12.com and (203) 785-0468.
Nix Burns with Spontaneous Combustion
Guitarist/composer Bern Nix, celebrated for his 12-year stint with Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, joins the homage to spontaneity as the featured guest artist at 3:00 pm on Sunday, April 19, in the ongoing Improvisations series at Hartford’s Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor Street.
Nix collaborates with the series’ curators and regular in-house performers, guitarist/bassist Joe Morris and cornetist Stephen Haynes.
Besides leading his own cutting-edge chamber groups, Nix has shared his freewheeling artistry with such figures as avant-garde grandee John Zorn and the late firebrand poet, gadfly activist and iconoclastic performance artist Jayne Cortez. Tickets: $15.00, general public; $12.00 RAW members; $5.00 students. Information: realartways.org and (860) 232-1006.
Modern Mode for Magisterial Elegy
As an elegiac homage to his mother, who died only eleven days after being diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2013, cornetist/composer Rob Mazurek and his newest ensemble, Black Cube SP, created Return the Tides: Ascension Suite and Holy Ghost, a 2014 release on Cuneiform Records that has been called “a cathartic and magisterial modern psychedelic spiritual.”
Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares presents Mazurek and Black Cube SP at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, April 15, at The Parlor Room at 32 Masonic Street in Northampton, Massachusetts. Along with Mazurek on cornet and electronics, the band features Mauricio Takara, drums, electronics and cavaquinho (Brazilian ukulele); Guilherme Granado, keyboard, synths and sampler; and Thomas Rohrer, rabeca (Brazilian viola) and soprano saxophone. Tickets: $15.00 available at jazzshares.org and at the door.
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