MUSIC
BY DANIEL BROMFIELD
THE NOT-SO-
LONELY ISLAND
Corvallis band the Barker Gypsies
bring music and art to the river
I
f you’re sailing down the Willamette River through
Corvallis, don’t be surprised when you hear distant
piano music. No, it’s not some river ghost — it’s
probably the Barker Gypsies.
For the past three summers, the folk-pop duo of
singer Catherine Ellis and keyboardist Brian Poucher has
claimed a sandbar just offshore from their hometown’s
Willamette Park and Natural Area as their base, playing
for river-floaters and landlubbers alike.
“People can hear us before they see us,” Ellis says.
They used to perform weekly, but as they’ve played
more and more gigs outside of Corvallis (Ellis is in
another band, Parish Gap, which performs at the Embers
in Eugene July 23), they’ve shifted to a monthly schedule.
The Gypsies’ next island set is 1 to 4:30 pm Sunday, July
31, followed by another session Sept. 4.
The Barker Gypsies have a repertoire of at least 30
songs, mostly covers but also some originals. They rarely
predetermine which songs they’ll play before hauling
their equipment out on a motorboat to the island, and the
vocal-keyboard setup affords plenty of freedom with
their setlist.
“If we feel like playing a song twice, we do it,” Ellis says.
MUSIC
CATHERINE ELLIS AND
BRIAN POUCHER
In addition to music, the Barker Gypsies also provide
art supplies for locals to participate in their People’s Map
of Corvallis project, an interactive digital map of Corvallis
they hope to someday turn into an app. Participants are
asked to draw their memories of specific spots in Corvallis,
then assign them to locations on the map.
“Someone might want to draw a pic of their university,
their first dorm,” Poucher says. “But we say you don’t
have to draw just a dorm, you can draw something that
happened there, like meeting your best friend. It’s a col-
lective history expressed in a new way.”
So far, nobody’s complained about these bohos taking
over a whole island for their music and art project.
“When we first started three years ago, we asked the
police, the county park department, the city department,”
Ellis says of seeking permission. Everyone just shrugged.
“That’s the kind of town Corvallis is,” says Poucher,
citing a recent proliferation of public pianos around town
as evidence of his hometown’s openness towards public
art and performance.
According to the band, those on the river are usually
delighted to see them. Some people even sing along to their
covers — a favorite being “Come Sail Away” by Styx.
“They’re floating!” Ellis says. “They want to sing
‘Come sail away/ Come sail away with me!’”
For more info, visit islandmusic.co.
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
ONE HELLUVA TOWN
From New York to New Orleans, musically speaking
B
right young talents conquer Broadway with hip
new streetwise music: Seven decades before
Hamilton, 25-year-old composer Leonard
Bernstein and his upstart young (average age 27)
drinking buddies — singer-songwriter-
comedians Betty Comden and Adolph Green and
choreographer Jerome Robbins — blitzed wartime
Broadway with On the Town.
Running for more than a year, the smash hit signaled a
changing of the guard in American musical theater, with
cutting-edge dance and bubbly music propelled by both
jazz and unprecedentedly sophisticated contemporary
classical sounds.
The Shedd’s new production, which opens at Jaqua
Concert Hall Friday, July 29, for a one-week run, reunites
its team of director Peg Major, music director Robert
Ashens and choreographer Caitlin Christopher to bring
this still exuberant and surprisingly forward-looking
show into the 21st century. Veteran Shedd actors Trevor
Eichhorn, Jim Ballard, Evan McCarty, Stephanie
Hawkins, Shannon Coltrane, Lynnea Barry, Matt
Leach and Rebekah Hope lead the cast.
The original production featured several Broadway
firsts: a racially integrated cast including a Japanese-
American whose father was interned in America’s racist
concentration camps; an African-American conductor; a
symphonic composer (Bernstein’s first symphony premiered
earlier that year); lustily assertive female characters; and a
cheerfully ribald, feminist attitude toward sex (“Come Up to
My Place,” “I Can Cook Too,” “Ya Got Me”).
Although then-raging World War II is never explicitly
mentioned, the story of three sailors on one-night shore
leave (taken from Bernstein and Robbins’s hit ballet
30
July 28, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
ON THE TOWN
Fancy Free earlier that year) sports a “Let’s have our fun
tonight, because who knows what’ll happen tomorrow”
vibe. They fall for an anthropologist, a taxi driver and a
Coney Island baby while soaking up Big Apple bustle.
The era’s dark side emerges only implicitly, in poi-
gnant instrumentals and songs like “Some Other Time”
(which jazz pianist Bill Evans turned into the touching
“Peace Piece”) and “Lonely Town” that lend a depth and
emotional counterpoint to brassy tunes like the immortal
“New York, New York.”
That sensational number is the big sloppy kiss that seals
what Bernstein called a love letter to the big city he’d
recently made his home and would soon come to dominate
as composer of West Side Story and so many other tri-
umphs, and as conductor of the New York Philharmonic.
On the Town went on to become a film (which stupidly
jettisoned most of the music) starring Gene Kelly and
Frank Sinatra and was revived in various forms that
provided star vehicles for Bernadette Peters, Tyne Daly,
Frederica Von Stade and many others.
And now this Broadway gem provides a little summer
infusion of urban buzz into a Eugene that seems at times
primed to turn into a real city.
Speaking of Broadway and young talent, Eugene’s
own Broadway House Concerts launches its new season
of intimate concerts in the little bungalow at Adams and
Broadway 7:30 pm Saturday, July 30, with New York (and
erstwhile Eugene) trumpeter-composer Josh Deutsch’s
No Chairs Ensemble. The stellar band (Portland piano
powerhouse Greg Goebel, drummer Jason Palmer,
tenor saxophonist Josh Hettwer, bassist Sean Peterson)
channels the brass band music of America’s other most
distinctive city: New Orleans.