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Bits and Pieces: 06.20.19

Tue, 06/18/2019 - 11:45

Music and Talk

Django Reinhardt, a French Gypsy, was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and is regarded as one of the great musicians of the 20th century. His legacy of driving, swinging “hot jazz” has been carried on by the Django Festival Allstars, a nine-piece band that will bring its music to Guild Hall on Saturday at 8 p.m.

The band is led by Dorado Schmitt, a guitarist-violinist, and his sons Samson and Amati. In a review of a Carnegie Hall concert last July, Mac Randall of Jazz Times wrote, “Schmitt is one of the principal modern-day keepers of the Reinhardt flame.”

The band also features Pierre Blanchard, violin, Ludovic Beier, accordion, DouDou Cuillerier and Francko Mehrstein, rhythm guitar, and, on bass, Antonio Licusati and Gino Roman. Tickets are $30 to $100, $28 to $95 for members.

A discussion between Frederic Tuten, a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, and the artist Eric Fischl will take place at Guild Hall on Sunday evening at 7. Mr. Tuten’s writing has been called “thorough, original, innocent and knowing, instinctive and cultured, narrative and pictorial” by the writer Edmund White. The discussion will focus on Mr. Tuten’s memoir, “My Young Life.” Tickets are $10, $8 for members.

Music will return to Guild Hall on Tuesday at 7 p.m. with a celebration of Cuban culture and dance. A brief lesson in Cuban salsa by Jaime Ruiz, who has been teaching the dance form for 12 years, will be followed by a dance party featuring music of Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican origin performed by Mambo Loco. Tickets are $30, $25 for members.

Pianofest Turns 31

Pianofest of the Hamptons, a summer festival-school that offers concentrated study to a small group of pianists selected by audition, will launch its 31st season with a concert on Monday at 5 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. 

Performances by the emerging talents will take place during the rest this month and July and August at the Avram Theater in Southampton, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, and the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. Paul Schenly, the festival’s founder and director, provides musical commentary during the performances, which are followed by receptions with the artists.

Tickets for the Southampton and East Hampton concerts are $20 at the door, free for students 18 and under, and $23 for the two Westhampton Beach performances. The schedule can be found on the Pianofest website.

‘Mailing Whaling’

“Mailing Whaling,” a hybrid exhibition of 20th-century whaling-related postcards and stamps and works by contemporary artists inspired by Sag Harbor’s whaling history, will open at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum with a reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. and continue through July 21.

Organized by Richard Doctorow, the museum’s curator and collections manager, the show will include stamps and postcards featuring whalers, whaling ships, whaling tools, and whaling scenes, we well as artwork by Robert Carioscia, Grover Gatewood, Susan Lazarus-Reimen, Barbara Maslen, Dave O, Sabina Streeter, and Bob Weinstein.

Classical Concerts

The Montauk Library will double as a concert hall this week with a performance by the East End Youth Quartet on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. and a recital by Francisco Roldan, a classical guitarist, on Wednesday evening at 7.  

The quartet’s members, all East End high school students, are Sofia E.C. Skoldberg and Kristina Georges, violin, Tessa Arnzen, viola, and Ethan Young, cello. Sunday’s program will include compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini, and Mendelssohn, Carlos Gardel, and two contemporary composers, Will Jennings and the late James Horner.

Mr. Roldan, a performer familiar to Montauk Library audiences, will perform masterworks created for guitar between the 16th and the 20th centuries by composers from Spain, Italy, Germany, Puerto Rico, and Paraguay. 

Robert Klein Onstage

A handful of tickets remain for Robert Klein’s Saturday evening performance at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. Since being chosen as a member of the Second City improv group in 1965 and cast by Mike Nichols in the Broadway musical “The Apple Tree” a year later, Mr. Klein has entertained audiences on Broadway, television, film, and with two Grammy Award-nominated albums, “Child of the Fifties” and “Mind Over Matter.”

“Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg,” a Starz documentary, featured Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, and others discussing Mr. Klein’s influence on their careers and comedy in general. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show range from $59 to $125.


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