A good show took place Saturday evening in Dalton.

The specters of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Oliver Nelson were definitely present in last night’s Jazz Band concert season opener, Stolen Moments.

Under the direction of Dr. Tom Evans, last season’s jazz band sported a tight group of senior members. This quarter’s jazz band was young, of the fourteen members in the ensemble eight are first years, and this concert would prove to be the make or break moment for the Band’s season.

The set began with an upbeat number called Got Rhythm by Doug Beach.  Throughout the evening, Dr. Evans engaged the audience with his anecdotes on the personnel and the music. He posed Got Rhythm as a challenge to the ensemble, who play the head and shout chorus unsupported by the rhythm section. All three soloists, one of the three being Dr. Evans, himself, proved they did indeed have rhythm.

Towards the middle of the set they performed Michael Mossman’s mambo flavored arrangement of the Duke Ellington standard, C-Jam Blues. Standing all of 4’11” without the additional podium and heels, Margaux Reckard, First year First Trumpet, led the section skillfully. Her chops are yet another reminder that size doesn’t matter. The piece featured a great portion of the line-up, including the masterful cowbell player, Ian Miller, and as the audience tapped their feet and bobbed their heads, it made one wish for a dance floor and a willing partner.

They followed up C-Jam Blues with the surprising addition of third trumpet turned vocalist, Amanda Patton, for How about You? It was a standard 1940s pop hit, but under Evans direction and Patton’s brassy vocals it still struck a chord and highlighted the versatility of the group.

The concerts title piece, Stolen Moments, was set off by the band’s desire for “mood lighting.” With the lights down low and the cool jazz wafting overhead, the obvious temptation was to be lulled to sleep, but the hot line of soloists prevented the possibility. Aaron Parach on alto sax headed off the piece that ended with a drum solo by Mike “Iggy” Ignagni.

Evans ended the concert with a piece called Back Burner that featured the sax section in a new light. First year Tenor sax, Joe Barth, played into the credenza and left me wondering what that kind of young talent was doing outside of the conservatory.

Having proven themselves worthy by occasionally channeling a few jazz greats, the band capped off the night with an encore of an apparent band favorite, Buffalo Wings.  As the audience exited into the chilly November air, they expressed their awe and favor to one another, looking forward to a spring concert which would surely yield a more tempered and tight-knit group. The predominant question: how much better could these very talented individuals get?

I’m looking at an America that’s confused.  We’ve got two wars, and somehow people care about an unemployed ex-governor who stepped down citing “The rugged rugged hardy people that live up here and some of the most patriotic people whom you will ever know live here, and one thing that you are known for is your steadfast support of our military community up here and I thank you for that and thank you United States military for protecting the greatest nation on Earth. Together we stand.”

I suppose her official title now would be “author.” Egads.

I think people question the President because he’s the president–this is necessary when done with intelligence, and politics when done without.  Our economy is not humming along like we expect it to, and of course people want healthcare and of course nobody wants to pay for it and of course we don’t necessarily want massive medical corporations to essentially control our health, but at least its better than nationalizing the entire industry because we’re Americans damnit, there’s such a thing as manners.

In his 1931 book Epic of America, James Truslow Adams writes of the American Dream:

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Essentially it’s the idea that America provides the gridiron on which personal liberty can score a touchdown.

With a Michigan unemployment rate at 14.8% as of September (up from 6.8% in April 2008 just prior to the crash), the present vitality of the Dream has been called into question:  how am I supposed to have a satisfying livelihood if I can’t get a job?  The Russians are breathing down our necks, and of course the socialists are having a field day.  I even met a Communist over the weekend.  A Communist!

America’s economic system is free market capitalism because free market capitalism is the closest economic manifestation of the rugged individualism that has allowed America to, well, exist.  America is an experiment in that we as citizens have essentially played out a three hundred thirty three year lab test to answer one simple question:  What happens when you let nature take over, the only check on which is the very people whom nature governs?

Our representative democracy, social principles, economic system and defining documents are all intended to simulate an animal existence in a natural world.  Though it certainly is not without its faults–the Electoral College, for example, probably should have been dismantled by now–it allows the best educated, keenest, and most voracious animals to win, hold jobs with large paychecks, and to be in positions of power where decisions for others are made.  Like a pack of wolves tearing apart a moose in the December woods, those who are able to obtain their fill will survive the winter, and the weak shall starve.

Sports are an even more interesting human experiment in that as opposed to human traits such as immense intelligence and wit determine the victor, it is the person who able to act the most animalistic who wins.  And what do they win?  And where does that money go?  YES!

Image that of flickr.com user mush2274

The idea here is the system of incentives that says positive actions will be rewarded with positive results, and stupid actions, like being weak, will result in death.  Wolf gets moose, we get money, and thus the financial opportunity for a healthy lifestyle and the ability to participate in varying levels of culture.  A neurosurgeon, for example, could theoretically attend both an Opera at the Fox Theater and a free jam poetry session at a Starbucks, whereas a homeless man could only attend the jam poetry session, but only if he had enough change for a hot chocolate, in which case there becomes a stratification for even the least expensive outlets of culture outside of public programs supported by the community.  We’re all playing Super Mario, and, to get to the next level, a player must get enough gold coins without dying.

The government does a pretty good job allow all strata of society complete access to culture–through public libraries–but then again, unless one is an accomplished autodidact, one may not be able to understand nor fully appreciate the content or context of what one is reading or to what one is listening.  So we have literacy programs, funded by both taxes and caring individuals and…

The wolves begin to pass meat down the food chain, blood dripping from their mouths.

Americans generally want the government to leave them alone unless they want something  from the government.  This allows the experiment to continue to run without any unnecessary variables, and Americans pride themselves in being thorough.  There is no government in nature outside of the dear Mother herself.

———–

Of course humans are not wolves, we just act like them.  We’re willing to make concessions from time to time, to pass meat down the line.  In fact, most of the developing world fails to appreciate just how nice we are to each other.  In my travels hither and thar, I was surprised just how convinced most foreigners were that we ate our young so as for mothers to avert future workforce competition, especially when considering the present state of unemployment.  We’re wolves, not sharks.  We are taught how to hunt, a natural instinct amongst carnivores one must carefully cultivate using the proper resources at hand.

Enter the guilds at Kalamzoo College.

Formed January 12, 2008, the guilds seek to “bring together alumni and current students, faculty and staff around interdisciplinary issues that affect today’s world.”  Made possible with a three-year/$249,500 grant from Detroit-based McGregor Fund, the guilds merged in February with the Center for Career and Professional Development so as to become institutionally funded by the time the grant runs dry mid-2010.

Initially, says Joan Hawxhurst, Director of the CCPD and The Guilds at Kalamazoo College, the guilds were going to focus their energy on event planning and presentation, but migrated more to an “apprentice-master” model that sought to pair students with professionals in their field of interest. “It adds an extra layer to the CCPD,” she said.  Anyone can join at the click of a button, and there are no associated fees.

Currently four guilds–Business, Sustainability, Justice and Peace, and Health–act as a two-way real life LinkedIn for alumni, students, organizations, and other professionals.  The guilds also seek to “march in step with the curriculum,” in order to “supplement department events,” Hawxhurst said.  Faculty are thus able to adapt guild activities to their courses, and the guilds, in turn, are able to bring guest speakers and other such “supplements” into the classroom.

“There is a deep, deep institutional commitment to the guilds,” she said.  “If you hear the President talk, I think she says the word ‘guild’ as much as anything else she talks about these days.”

In the next two to four years, the College could see the creation of two to four more guilds drawn from the many proposed “target ideas,” including Education, the Arts, Media and Technology, Public Service, and Language, Hawxhurst said.  Furthermore, the emphasis on “face-to-face” connecting in this business of “linkages and pipelines” has resulted in strengthened relationships between the College and the greater Kalamazoo area, primarily through local alumni.

For now, however, Hawxhurst wants to “get it done well before moving on to the next thing.”

The wolf turns to the weak, bloodied beta, grins a toothy smile, and pushes raw flesh across the snow with his nose.

After all, it’s almost Thanksgiving!

Thomas Gilchrist contributed reporting on this article, including the interview with Director Hawxhurst

Editor’s Note: a correction was made in quotation from “If you hear President Wilson-Oyelaran speak, practically every other word is ‘guilds,’ ” to the correct “If you hear the President talk, I think she says the word ‘guild’ as much as anything else she talks about these days.”

Sam Bertken (K '11) as Berenger in "Rhinoceros," opening tonight.

Smoke lingered amongst the rafters as the drums beat to what was not quite an African sound, but an industrial one, like men building a skyscraper while forging the steel with massive hammers on-site.  First in the distance, the ruckus built steadily with fog horns and murmurs louder and louder, with an intensity like knowing a train is getting closer but being unable to see it, until you’re shaking in your seats as the curtain prepared to open and now it’s a frantic jungle jump and the lights dim and a well-groomed frenchman walks onto stage.

Written in 1959 by Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros is often viewed as a theatrical metaphor for the misguided herd syndrome leading up to the height of fascism and stalinism.  Set in prewar France against wonderfully skeletal, eerily revealing multi-leveled metal pipe apartments designed by the miraculously consistent John Reeves, it is the story of one man’s struggle to maintain the integrity of his self amidst an ever-increasing populist threat.  Berenger, played by the terrifically open-eyed Sam Bertken, a town drunkard, wishful lover, and questioning everyman, is witness to a strange phenomenon: people are turning into rhinoceroses.

One would think the town would have a simple solution upon the first sighting of a rhinoceros in France:  somebody should shoot it.  Instead they are wooed by the bowler-hat wearing showman  “Logician” who turns the conversation not to whether or not the rhinoceros problem should be stopped, but to whether the rhinoceros was from Africa or Asia, appeasing the masses to avoid the problem altogether.  Soon thereafter, the citizenry is trapped by the rhinoceroses, unable to escape.  One by one people fall.  One to serve his country, one to apathy, one to ambition, one to logic, until all who remain are Berenger and his love interest Daisy (the serenely flirtatious Marissa Rossman), trapped in their high, jail-like apartment, completely exposed, and surrounded by a mumbling, churning, ever-growing, increasingly dangerous herd of rhinoceroses.

It is a play about the desperate attempts of man to maintain moral standards in the face of almost certain assimilation into the fatal, self-less hoards of herd mentality, to sustain the supple, human face of autonomous individuals amidst the hard leathery skin and protruding proboscises of Elaine Kauffman’s (fabulous) pachyderms.

Rhinoceros takes time to get to where its going, heeded in part by the notoriously sonorous and rushed projection of Vince Kusiak’s Jean, the hapless idealist who more than compensates for dialogue with his captivating and horrific hydian transformation into a rhinoceros, the audience’s first look at just what one undertakes in such an inhuman endeavor as losing one’s humanity.

Perhaps once viewed as a “never again!” rallying cry back in the Fifties, Rhinoceros remains today sadly relevant as more of a “Hello!  Wake up!” call to this rendition’s distinctively American audience.  In her Director’s Note, Liza Bielby reflects, “Turning on the news to watch a segment on anything from healthcare reform to gun control, you’re most likely going to catch a screaming match with no compromise in sight… Have we all become animals hooting, bellowing, and charging through the streets?  How can we be sure that the person at the front of the pack has good intentions–or that there is someone at the head of the pack?”

Two American wars are going on that, outside of reported casualties, seem to have lost popular favor in both the media and the public.  Instead we have tea partiers, Birthers, and have turned to larger distractions such as health care.  Celebrations of a healthy country are rendered mute by an America at war.  There really does seem to be a lot of yelling going on.  Protests are a necessary tenet of a healthy democracy, but it seems like, as a nation, we are protesting in both directions.  And really, it’s all about caring.  Never stop caring.  Humanity is about caring.  Humanity is caring.  Listen to Berenger, “I am not capitulating!”

This is one protest that must never end.

Rhinoceros opens tonight as the Fall iteration of the Festival Playhouse Theatre Arts at Kalamazoo College, in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse at Kalamazoo College.  Liza Beilby, Directing.  Starring Vince Kusiak, Sam Bertken, Marissa Rossman, and Calder Burgam.

Tickets: Thursday: Per donation.  Friday-Sunday: Students: $5, Senior: $10, Adults, $15.