Ravinia 2022, Issue 3

BENNETT GORDON HALL 1:00 PM SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2022 SPIDER SALOFF ERIC SCHNEIDER, saxophone JEREMY KAHN, piano STEWART MILLER, bass Let’s Misbehave! The Life and Music of Cole Porter SPIDER SALOFF She’s been heard around the world as the host/star of the syndicated public radio series Words and Music , but for thousands of Chica- goans, the most familiar way to enjoy the jazz stylings of Spider Saloff has been through live performances. The Chicago-based jazz vocal- ist has won accolades around the world for her introspective approach to the genre, most profoundly through her one-woman tribute to George Gershwin, The Memory of All That , conceived with the blessing of the Gershwin estate. Saloff ’s New York City nightclub en- gagements have included cabaret turns at Birdland and Feinstein’s that have made her a five-time winner of the MAC Award from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets. She is no stranger to major concert stages, either, having performed on Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Chicago Jazz Festival at Millennium Park and at the Auditorium Theatre, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Born and raised in New Jersey, Saloff made a name for herself in New York before making Chicago her adopted home in the mid-1990s. She quickly became a fixture on the local music scene with shows at such venerable nightspots as The Green Mill, Winter’s Jazz Club, and the Jazz Showcase. For more than a decade, Saloff has taught vocal master classes at the Bloom School of Jazz in Chicago, as well as all over the US and in the UK and Italy, and she continues to take stages internationally as an ambassador of the Great American Songbook. She’s presented her one-woman musical, The Roar of the Butterfly , onstage from Chicago to Los Angeles to Melbourne, and her original song “When You See Me,” a jazz/hip-hop/R&B tune co-written with Jewel Tancy and Max Hornung in 2013, has garnered over 100,000 streams. In addition to a 1997 recording of her Gershwin tribute, Saloff ’s discography includes such titles as Sextet (1995), A New Set of Standards (1999), Cool Yule (2000), Like Glass (2005), and Ella! Ella! Ella! (2011), a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald alongside Frieda Lee and Dee Alexander. Spider Saloff is making her fourth appearance at Ravinia since 2015. PAVILION 7:30 PM SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2022 POI DOG PONDERING POI DOG PONDERING Originally a solo artistic alias of bandleader Frank Orrall, Poi Dog Pondering developed into a multi-piece theatro-musical group in 1986 with performances at the Honolulu Arts Academy, combining music with a series of films inspired by Andy Warhol and the Vel- vet Underground. The group left Hawai’i for mainland North America the following year, touring the United States and Canada by way of busking and establishing the group’s long-standing Bohemian, DIY aesthetic. Set- tling in Texas, Poi Dog Pondering released their first album in 1988. With the backing of Columbia Records, the band added polish with a wide variety of string and percussive effects on the blend of radio-ready and quirky tracks that composed 1989’s Wishing Like a Moun- tain and Thinking Like the Sea . Melodic grooves and innovative percussion marked Poi Dog Pondering’s foray into dance music with Volo Volo in 1992, the same year the group decamped for Chicago and formed their own label, Platetectonic Music. The critically acclaimed disc Pome- granate was released in 1995, when the band also began a decade of collaborations with the Chi- cago Sinfonietta and Grant Park Orchestra, culminating in rock-remix arrangements of themes from Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and Bizet’s Carmen that were performed at Symphony Center. Those partnerships allowed Poi Dog Pondering to delve heavily into lush orchestration, the results of which were heard along with further experimentation in house and electronic mu- sic on 1999’s Natural Thing and 2003’s In Seed Comes Fruit . Over that same period, Orrall joined Chicago’s electronic music community both in a solo guise as 8fatfat8 and as vocalist and percus- sionist of Thievery Corporation, with which he still tours. With those combined experiences, Poi Dog Pondering sought to create a straightforward rock and soul album, which emerged in 2008 as 7 and led to the group earning Best Rock/Pop Act honors from a Chicago Reader poll in 2009. Their most recent records are Everybody’s Got a Star (2015) and Remnants of Summer (2018), and a new one is on the way later this year. Tonight Poi Dog Pondering makes its fifth appearance at Ravinia, having made its debut in 1997. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 18 – JULY 31, 2022 34