August 2024 (Vol. 2) - Digital Edition
by Jaiden van Bork
Most people don’t understand how memory really works, says neuroscientist Lisa Genova. “We use this word ‘forget’ a lot,” she says — we “forget” our keys, “forget” our phone, and “forget” people’s names. Genova says that in reality, when you can’t remember something like that, it’s probably because you never formed the memory in the first place. How’s that for some harsh truth?
by Georgie Johnson
“Everything ripples, right?” says Eleanor Getz as she does her makeup in the mirror and dons a white beard in preparation for tonight’s show, Overboard. Director and star (one of many) of the new performance, Getz shares her thoughts and feelings surrounding the role of circus and performing arts’ power to influence change in our immediate and far-reaching environments, relating that “the work is so much more meaningful when it has something to say…it feels more impactful and important, even if in more of a local way.”
Earlier this year, the National Parks Service finished its demolition of 40+ buildings within the Cape Cod National Seashore — a project contracted to Cherokee CRC, LLC, a tribal-owned small business located in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The buildings were dilapidated, decaying, and dangerous, and have been demolished in order to clear the way for a restoration of the Cape’s natural landscapes, with federal funding from the Great American Outdoors Act.
With these structures gone, the Parks Service can continue the incredibly important work of nurturing and protecting this fragile environment, enabling thousands if not millions to experience the fantastic natural beauty of the Cape Cod National Seashore — a region that Payomet is incredibly proud to call home.
by Michael Fee
Mark your calendars adventurers! The unique artistry of José James and his band will grace the stage at Payomet on Saturday September 7 at 7 P.M., in what promises to be one of the most unique shows of the season.
James is an accomplished composer, guitarist, bandleader and vocalist. Raised in Minneapolis, he attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and burst on the scene in 2008 with his debut album “The Dreamer,” a self-described “jazz artist for the hip hop generation.” The New York Times described his genre-bending sound as “[T]he result of the black-pop continuum, jazz and soul and hip-hop and R&B, slow cooked for more than 50 years.” Surprisingly, James was only thirty at the time.
Several stellar albums followed, and James took both the Edison Award and L’Academie du Jazz Grand Prix for best Vocal Jazz Album of 2010. He signed with Blue Note and cranked out five critically acclaimed LP’s between 2012 and 2018, with “Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday” (2015), and “Lean on Me” (2018), a love letter to Bill Withers, achieving the greatest commercial success. They are terrific records, full of fresh and eclectic takes on masterworks and well worth an extended listen before the show on September 7.
James’s approach to his art has matured and evolved. In 2018 he and his wife, bandmate and Grammy nominee Talia Billig, formed an independent label called Rainbow Blonde. According to James the inspiration was more than economic. “It’s really about owning and controlling your own music,” he says, “And the idea of community – which is why we have other artists on the label as well. And definitely Prince and his battle with his record label was a huge influence in our decision to go independent.”
James’s recent work is sonically sophisticated and leans deeply into his greatest musical influencers: Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. In earlier work James successfully blurred the lines between traditional and contemporary jazz and hip-hop. Now, at the apex of his musical prowess, soul, funk, Latin, rock and pop are more prominent in the mix. The songwriting also reflects a deep discomfort with the state of our world and a hopefulness that somehow love will prevail.
James’s most recent release “1978” (Rainbow Blonde 2024) is a tour de force likely to be featured prominently in the Payomet performance. The album’s title recalls an historic year in music when soul, funk, rock, disco and jazz were all meeting and merging on the radio and dance floors. Reggae, African music and the nascent ethos of hip-hop were also influencing artists and music lovers across the country. “1978” captures that zeitgeist with a groove that is smooth and seductive, deeply personal and socially conscious.
The band is fire. Marcus Machado on guitar, Chad Selph on keys, David Ginyard on bass, Jharis Yokley on drums provide tight, connected rhythms that allow James’s vocal stylings to roam and soar. Leon Ware, the Motown songwriter who worked with Marvin Gaye, helped James craft the songs.
The opening tracks bop, rock and explode. Check out “Saturday Night (Need You Now)” and try not to shake your tailfeathers, I dare you. The album also features notable performances by Belgian rapper Baloji and Brazilian vocalist Xenia Franca. “This 70s idea of a global Black sound was new then and I decided we’re going to have traditionally based musicians from the diaspora on the album but do it in a way that feels global but familiar,” James says. It works.
The album’s last two tunes are the most poignant, political and intriguing. “38th and Chicago” and “For Trayvon” pay tribute to George Floyd and Trayvon Martin, victims of racially motivated murders that fueled the Black Lives Matter movement, and sparked James’s own existential reflection. “I think any Black man in America can relate to either one of these songs,” wrote James on his website. “We all have a very personal connection to what happened to these two Black men. I grew up right next to 38th and Chicago where Floyd was killed by a cop. I was a teenager [there] walking around with a hoodie.”
In a 2024 interview with NPR James was asked what he was trying to convey in that moment. “[These events] are not a one-time occurrence,” he said. “This is a reality that Black and Brown people live. It’s been my reality since I was 14 . . . and I think it’s just a question that Marvin [Gaye] would have asked, Just how long Lord? How long do we have to endure this until we can recognize each other as brother, and it’s really that simple.”
As hard as the subject matter may be, James’s music and attitude are invariably upbeat — 120 beats per minute to be exact. He told NPR that “the right way to convey a political message is to make it still danceable because it is about celebrating life at the end of the day.”
After 12 albums and 16 years in the business, who is José James now? In James’s 2017 essay entitled “How I Stopped Being a Jazz Singer and Started Loving Myself”, the artist pondered the question. “[Am I] the awkward biracial kid that grew up in white, blue-collar Minneapolis in the 80’s where everyone seemed to hate [me]? Yes. [Am I] the kid who loved jazz because his dad did, made his daddy’s dreams his own to try to get attention and then surpassed him? Hell yeah. [Am I] the Black kid who was raised white, so he didn’t fit in anywhere but loved everything and all music?” I believe the correct answer is “All of the above.” James is one talented, self-aware and thoughtful cat who is all about the musical journey.
So dear adventurers, is José James a jazz singer or a soul singer? Old school or new school? A guardian of musical traditions or a restless spirit champing to break norms. I suspect all are true, but you need to decide for yourself, Saturday, September 7, 2024, under the tent in North Truro at 7 P.M. I’ll be there.
In his 2017 essay James mused “S*** is real right now. So real. We are in trouble, and we need to unite to save ourselves and the planet. We need to believe women and people of color. We need to listen and be honest with ourselves and each other. We need to understand how our words and our actions impact the world that we live in and are creating/destroying. We need to value each other’s voices and stories.”
Amen.
Michael Fee lives in Truro and is the host of Road Trippin’, which airs weekly Thursday mornings on WOMR.
By Jaiden van Bork
Most people don’t understand how memory really works, says neuroscientist Lisa Genova. “We use this word ‘forget’ a lot,” she says — we “forget” our keys, “forget” our phone, and “forget” people’s names. Genova says that in reality, when you can’t remember something like that, it’s probably because you never formed the memory in the first place. How’s that for some harsh truth?
Genova is of course a scientist, but you probably know her for her 2007 bestselling book, Still Alice (or its 2014 film adaptation starring Julian Moore) which follows a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard University who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s and must wrestle with the implications of this tragic diagnosis. The novel, along with the four others Genova has released since, is fiction, but Genova has a rigorous research process for each. “I like to say that I’m telling the truth under imagined circumstances,” she says, “And I recognize an enormous responsibility [in that], for folks who live with these diseases, I am representing them.”
The author consults everything from medical journals to memoirs in preparation for writing. Importantly, she also spends a great deal of time speaking with both medical professionals who deal with a disease, and the individuals who themselves experience them. “I get to be a student with every book,” she says, “I get to be a beginner, and I learn so much.”
Some parts of the research process reveal surprising truths about these conditions, says Genova. For one thing,“It’s not depressing to be around folks who have ALS or Alzheimer’s. I mean, the tragedy and the sadness of the crisis is certainly there… but people don’t live the tragedy of their diagnosis 24/7.”
Understanding these subtler aspects of living with a neurological disease is key to Genova’s approach. The author says empathy – which she contrasts sharply with sympathy — is incredibly important to her. “[Sympathy] keeps us at an emotional distance,” she says, “so I can feel bad for you, I can feel embarrassed for you, frustrated for you, heartbroken for you — but there’s a separateness, like you’re different [from] me… Even though there can be a kindness to it, there’s also a complete separation. Empathy is when you feel with someone. That’s when we take that imaginative leap and imagine what it feels like to be you… It collapses that emotional distance between us.”
Of course, Genova’s extensive background in neuroscience (she has a PhD in the subject from Harvard) makes her uniquely qualified to tell these stories. “I knew from a young age I was interested in being a scientist,” she says, “I loved biology, and I was interested in how the body works.” After taking her first neuroscience course in her undergrad, Genova says she became fascinated with figuring out the brain.
“A memory is basically a neural circuit,” she says, “Every time you learn something new, every time you experience something that you perceive and pay attention to… [it] becomes a woven, a woven pattern of stable connections and neural circuits. If I activate any part of that neural circuit tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now, [or] 50 years from now — that whole circuit can be activated and I can retrieve the woven information. And that’s a memory.”
The key here, Genova says, is that you have to be paying attention. That’s why, often when we “forget” things, we didn’t actually lose any memories — we just never made them. She stresses that this is really okay — our brains are simply not meant to take on the massive amount of information we have to process on a daily basis, so it makes sense that certain things will slip our mind. At the same time, practicing paying attention can also help us to be less “forgetful” in our day to day lives.
Sometimes these memory circuits simply become weakened over time. The less they are drawn upon and recalled, the weaker they become — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. “For example,” says Genova, “I don’t remember who my fourth grade teacher [was]. I cannot come up with her name… But I would bet you, if you gave me a multiple choice with her name on there, I would recognize it, which tells me that the memory is still in my brain.” She explains that the more we actively remember something, the more robust the circuit becomes.
Demystifying the workings of the brain is critical to helping people struggling with neurological conditions, says Genova, “I think anything going on from the neck up carries a lot of stigma and shame… People feel they can’t talk about it, they can’t admit to it, and they have to hide it. And anytime we’re keeping this kind of a secret, in addition to the burdens of the disease itself, now we have the burden of alienation and isolation…” She says it’s tremendously important for members of the community struggling with cognitive loss to know that they are not alone.
On Cape Cod, which can be isolating enough on its own (particularly in the off-season), and which is populated by an aging community, the stakes of Alzheimer’s research and treatment are clear. Genova comes to Payomet for a performance to benefit the Alzheimer’s Family Support Center in Brewster, a nonprofit organization providing psychosocial educational support to families, professionals and individuals living with Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related diseases. These services include free and confidential care consultations, organized opportunities for social engagement, and support groups. The center also engages in community outreach and education to promote awareness of these types of conditions and offers cognitive health screenings across the Cape. Genova’s performance is “not a traditional lecture,” she says. The talk will focus on the kinds of forgetting that many people experience on a daily basis and attempt to bust some myths and provide helpful tips related to brain health.
Come check out Where Did I Put My Keys? How We Remember and Why We Forget with Lisa Genova on August 27th and 7pm here at Payomet. Don’t let this incredible event slip your mind!
by Bob Weiser
Sarah Jarosz is just hitting her stride.
Never mind the four Grammys (out of ten nominations). Forget about the awards from the Folk Alliance International (FAI), and the Americana Music Association (AMA). And for sure, forget her keynote address to the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA). Instead, listen to any, or all, of her six studio albums, now topped off by the latest, number seven, Polaroid Lovers. Then come out for the show on Saturday, August 31st, under the Payomet tent, the Polaroid Lovers tour. Originally set for February to June, summer and fall dates have been added including our local show at the old Air Force base.
Sara Jarosz has been performing professionally for more than half of her 33 years and, as I said, she’s just hitting her stride. Fronting a full band, playing songs that are deeper and more personal than ever, owning the room yet sharing it in ways that find her stretching the boundaries of her music and her life – Jarosz is finding more joy. She’s also finding the freedom that comes with confidence, with more responsibility, and with greater risk.
Jarosz was raised in a small town in Texas. She recalls that there was always recorded music around. Her parents were teachers, not musicians, but the car was filled with music and singing along was always part of the ride. When she was ten, she began playing the mandolin. Her interest was obvious and her parents brought her to the local Friday night bluegrass jam. In a Texas town where most folks followed football on Fridays, she had the good fortune to fall in with a crowd of older folks who welcomed her and taught her. She mostly taught herself mandolin, then guitar, and was introduced to banjo by a gentleman at the jam session. As she grew more interested and proficient, another stroke of luck was that her parents, being teachers, had time in the summer to take her to festivals and music camps.
Unlike some other prodigies, she was never pushed into the competitive aspect of the music world. Instead, she followed her muse while making friends with her young contemporaries. She fell in love with the octave mandolin (like a normal mandolin, but tuned an octave lower), buying her first one with earnings from the gigs she was getting in and around her hometown in the Texas hill country. She was signed to a recording contract by Sugar Hill while she was still in high school, and her debut recording came out shortly after she graduated. Her parents encouraged her to get an education, rather than committing to a music on the road career out of high school and she chose to follow that advice to Boston and the New England Conservatory (NEC).
During her 4 years at NEC, she continued to perform professionally, and released her second recording. Much of her time in Boston was spent jamming with her contemporaries, most of whom were at Berklee College of Music. After graduating with honors in 2013 with a degree in Contemporary Improvisation, she lived in New York City when she wasn’t on the road, touring extensively with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan (later as the band ‘I’m With Her’), with Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, and joining the lineup of NPR’s Live From Here hosted by Chris Thile.
All the while, Sarah wrote many of her songs, but was always reluctant to co-write. It was her move to Nashville in 2020 that led to her co-writing evolution which is evident on Polaroid Lovers. She’s described this in a way many find counter-intuitive, saying that she wasn’t comfortable with the collaboration process until she felt certain of her own voice as a writer.
Listen for yourself, Saturday August 31, under the tent. This child prodigy has fully come of age, fully into her voice as a writer, co-writer, band leader, singer, and multi-instrumentalist.
Bob Weiser has hosted “The Old Songs’ Home” on WOMR for more than twenty years, every Monday from 9:30am-12:30pm, playing old and new folk and acoustic music, traditional and contemporary. He’s also the Music Director of the Harwich Cranberry Festival.
By Georgie Johnson
“Everything ripples, right?” says Eleanor Getz as she does her makeup in the mirror and dons a white beard in preparation for tonight’s show, Overboard. Director and star (one of many) of the new performance, Getz shares her thoughts and feelings surrounding the role of circus and performing arts’ power to influence change in our immediate and far-reaching environments, relating that “the work is so much more meaningful when it has something to say…it feels more impactful and important, even if in more of a local way.”
The butterfly effect and its enduring “ripples” are an apt analogy to describe the nautical narrative that this social circus is ready to share with you just outside the W.H.A.T. Theater in Wellfleet. Eleanor Getz and Gabrielle Ment, the two co-directors of Payomet’s Cirque by the Sea company, have been working together for over ten years to bring the magic, novelty and influence of circus arts to the Outer Cape. Each year they undertake a new socio-environmental issue by which they build a completely unique and original production, hoping to help audiences access information and inspire activism in an entertaining way for both adults and kids. This year audiences find themselves submerged in their captivating show about a churlish sea captain who has a profound change of heart after being faced with the effects of his greedy and careless actions towards the ocean.
The inspiration for Overboard goes back almost ten years ago to 2015, when Ment embarked on SEA Semester at Oberlin College, where students conduct oceanic research while sailing the Atlantic. “I was really inspired to incorporate some of the research that I was doing at sea,” says Ment, an environmental and dance studies graduate, “and something I took away from being in that research field is that science and environmental research are often very insular and not necessarily accessible to the public… I didn’t want to be a researcher, that wasn’t necessarily my forte, but… I felt like my calling was to be a bridge-maker between the science world and the rest of the public…”
Ment’s double-winged passion for inspiring sustainable, ecological change as well as for circus and movement arts seems to be in perfect alignment with Payomet’s mission, which fosters “education”, “cultural and social awareness” in the performing arts, and, furthermore, explores “issues of relevance in the communities [it] serve[s]”. When reminiscing on her beginnings at Payomet, Ment shared that the opportunity to take this role “felt like an answer to a vision and a dream that [she] already had.”
In order to better understand the specific concerns facing the Cape and cultivate this educational aspect of their show, the Cirque by the Sea team consulted Laura Ludwig from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. Ludwig says many commercial and non-commercial fishing vessels face a serious issue when it comes to waste. “A huge problem is that there’s no place to put [trash] when [fishermen] get to shore,” she says, “Which is another reason why the ocean is the trash can.”
Ludwig explains, “We have [waste] infrastructure, we have systems, but we don’t have them for fishermen,” leaving many workers to foot the bill for the disposal of their own waterborne trash and therefore less incentive to store it and bring it to shore like our wayward captain who instead throws it overboard.
In fact, in 2022, coastal studies volunteers helped remove over 36,000 pieces of debris–not necessarily from fishermen–through beach cleanups. The hefty list of items included more than 3,000 rigid plastic pieces, 2,000 foam pieces, 2,000 food wrappers, 2,000 plastic film pieces, 2,000 cigarette butts, 2,000 plastic bottle caps, 1,000 rope pieces less than 3 feet, 1,000 foam cup pieces, 1,000 balloons or strings and 800 net pieces. This marine debris comes from not only sea-bound vessels and fishing gear, but from so many sources–trucks that don’t secure their cargo, single-use plastics, even the U.S. Army—which causes habitat destruction, entanglement of animals, and eventually breaks down to become microplastics that attract and carry pollutants throughout the ecosystem.
Ment and Getz, who wanted to focus Overboard on spreading awareness of these and other issues faced by our ocean, deftly incorporated these themes both on a surface-level as well as profoundly, through the actual process of creating the show. Many of the props they use in their show–including the handcrafted, eighteen-foot-long humpback whale puppet, designed by Copper Santiago–come from marine debris that they collected with help from Coastal Studies, who encourages artists to repurpose derelict and washed up fishing gear and plastics.
Although the show centers the story of an old, cantankerous and greedy captain, partly inspired by Scrooge from A Christmas Carol (and spectacularly played in drag by Getz), his indifferent attitude towards the treatment of his environment is meant to be a wakeup call for us all. “We are all accountable, and yes, it’s a broken system, but even a bag of potato chips that we buy in the middle of America, if we don’t dispose of it properly, can blow into the ocean,” says Ment, repeating that “it’s not just fishermen or people at sea, it’s all of us”, calling on us to take a closer look at both our policies as well as our personal, quotidian actions and impact on our communities, small and large.
“I don’t want to go to a circus show to feel shamed and feel guilty. I want to feel motivated to do something different…” shares Cirque by the Sea puppeteer Copper Santiago. When asked what is special about circus arts in delivering this message to an audience she says, “I think circus kind of uniquely gives that awe that the ocean has.” Indeed, circus arts have the power to infiltrate people’s hearts with its spectacular presentation of risk and magical imposition of imagery, leaving them receptive to the information it has to offer and inspired to take action–for nothing is impossible in the circus, even restoring and cleaning the ocean, our basin of life.
If you’re interested in seeing this year’s Overboard, you’re in luck! For just two more weeks you can catch them Monday, Wednesday or Friday at 6pm outside the W.H.A.T. Theater off Route 6 in Wellfleet!
And if you want to get involved in Coastal Studies’ beach cleanup efforts you can join the Beach Brigade by sending an email to volunteer@costalstudies.org or access this list of 10 things YOU can do to help minimize your plastic use!
By Executive Director, Kevin Rice
James Herman is not in the Payomet Circus but he could be a trapeze artist given his ability to fly from music artist to band. James is our Production Manager, whose primary area of responsibility is to make sure that every show comes off flawlessly — not an easy task when you look at the diversity of our programming! His summer is like one long tech rehearsal punctuated every other day – and sometimes consecutive days – by great concerts.
Just in the last week, we presented bluegrass, soul/blues, reggae, Grateful Dead, Garrison Keillor and coming up, two major productions – theater and comedy – at Provincetown Town Hall.
Satisfying our artists’ production needs is like riding a roller coaster, and a constant challenge demanding different levels of equipment, staffing, hospitality and lodging. James handles it all with aplomb!
As the saying goes, the devil’s in the details. So here’s a closer look at just the recent week’s lineup and shows through mid-August:
– Sierra Hull-bluegrass (4 on stage, 6 in touring party)
– Ruthie Foster-soul/blues (1 on stage, 2 in touring party)
– The Garcia Project (4 on stage, 5 touring party, projections needed)
– Deadgrass- (5 on stage, 6 in touring party, includes Afterparty for Pan Mass Challenge)
– Steel Pulse, reggae (6 on stage, 17 in touring party!)
– Garrison Keillor, spoken word/music (1 on stage, 2 in touring party, needs wifi and a printer on stage!)
– Taylor Mac, music/theater/performance art (5 on stage, 8 in touring party, requires a full dress rehearsal day before the show)
– Paula Poundstone, comedy (1 on stage, 2 in touring party)
– Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal, Country/Americana (2 on stage, 3 in touring party)
– Watchhouse (4 on stage, 7 in touring party)
These shows will range in size from 300-700 audience members. Each artist’s needs are different. Again, James is not a circus artist, but can you imagine all the hoops he must jump through to handle these varied demands and details and make sure we hit the highest possible production values. And, to boot, Taylor Mac is at Provincetown Town Hall which, because of its unique infrastructure and the fact that it operates by day as a municipal building, presents its own constraints. Extra effort is always required at off-site venues, respecting, in this case, Town Manager Alex Morse and Events Manager Tim Hess.
It’s easy to think, as some folks do, that all of this can be handled by studying the “Artist Rider” in advance. But what’s much more important, and what James does in his own beautiful way, is develop a relationship with the Touring Manager of each artist. Because, to put it simply, things change and the Artist Rider is static. James finds out — usually by getting on the phone — what the band really needs, what they want at this point (Payomet tent) in their tour. He works hand in glove with our Hospitality Manager, Lynn Martin and our Tech/Sound Guru, Chris Blood, to make sure those elements come together as well.
Leaping trapeze to trapeze, jumping through hoop after hoop, it’s ultimately a balancing act James has mastered. Almost like our own Philippe Petit, he fastens a strong and taut line of communication from pole to pole, Artist Touring party on one end and Payomet on the other, with the “net net” (a favorite term of Payomet’s co-chair, Alan Chebot!) creating the bedazzlement of audiences at the spectacle of Artists in the air. But it’s we, Payomet staff and volunteers, who marvel daily at our own “man on a wire.” And who does it all without a net!
