The Palladium and some members of the Palladium artistic family picked up Best of the Bay Awards from Creative Loafing on Wednesday night.
Our jazz man, Nate Najar and his trio won as Best Local Jazz Ensemble
Our favorite opera company, St. Petersburg Opera, took home the award for Best Opera Company.
I was particularly proud that our Side Door show with the great David Amram earned a Critic’s Choice award. Read on for the rave writeup:
Best Flashback to the Beat Generation
David Amram & Friends at The Palladium’s Side Door Cabaret
David Amram
The Palladium’s Paul Wilborn promised this show would be “a special night,” and it was more than that — it was unforgettable. The evening, part of the SunLit Festival, wove a kind of time-travel magic, as if we’d been transported to an underground boite in Greenwich Village c. 1956: Jim Sorensen and Colleen Cherry mastering the hard-boiled romance of Jack Kerouac’s words, curled around the sounds of James Suggs’s trumpet; La Lucha’s Alejandro Arenas and Mark Feinman providing expert accompaniment on bass and drums; the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s wry John McEuen, cracking wise and playing a mean banjo; Wilborn’s sinuous rendition of “Summertime.” But Amram, the 86-year-old musical polymath, was the unquestionable star, spinning yarns (from first grade in Pass-A-Grille to hanging out in coffeehouses on MacDougall Street to writing the score for The Manchurian Candidate); playing an orchestra’s worth of of instruments, from French horn to flute to piano; singing Pete Seeger and even scatting a little (and did he yodel, too?); and playing piano in a style that was both freewheeling and exacting. —David Warner
Here’s a link to the piece:
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