Greg Stepanich

Missing 'The Guardian'

Cleaning up during a redesign of our house, Sharon found an old TV guide from August stuffed into a magazine cozy near one of the big wingback chairs. One of the letters to the editor complained about the cancellation of CBS' The Guardian, and asked whether the lead actor in that series, Simon Baker, had any other projects in the pipeline.
The letter reminded me of my eternal and undying bitterness toward Les Moonves and the rest of the CBS big shots who canceled this show, replacing it with Clubhouse, a show whose trailers were so bad it wasn't even worth tuning in to see whether it lived down to its promise.
No, there had to be millions of us who actually took time on Tuesday nights to watch The Guardian, and found in it what Sharon and I found: A drama about real, conflicted people, in which things rarely worked out, and the overall tone was that of life as it actually is, full of ambivalence and drift, and nonetheless enlivened with moments of passion and happiness that inspire us to continue. (Here's a fan site link: http://i.webring.com/hub?ring=guardianoncbs
For those who never saw it, The Guardian was about a young Pittsburgh lawyer named Nick Fallin (played by Baker, an Australian) who got busted on cocaine charges and was sentenced to thousands of hours of community service working for a pro bono legal services firm that handled child custody cases. Nick was a tortured guy, resentful of having to work in the child welfare system, and deeply in thrall to his darker impulses. These impulses were displayed in a more sublimated way by his lawyer father Burton, played by Dabney Coleman, who gave a brilliant portrayal of a man who had achieved success at the expense of a healthy relationship with his son and his own tendency to cut ethical corners.
One of the key plot elements in the three years the show was on the air was Nick's relationship with a coworker named Lulu (the beautiful Wendy Moniz), who got married to another man before succumbing to an affair with Nick. Her marriage ended, but her relationship with Nick didn't quite gell — though she became pregnant with his child, and learned the baby would be born with Down syndrome.
This basic melodrama was played out amid numerous shorter stories of fights over children, all of which required plenty of screen time for child actors, and here it must be said that The Guardian found some of the most talented young actors to be seen anywhere. Among the best performances was one by a young actress playing a 12-year-old girl dying of a fatal illness (I don't remember what) whom Nick decides to adopt. The girl dies in surgery, but before going in for the procedure gave a world-weary, mature but optimistic speech to Nick; it was a splendid piece of acting, and also pointed up Nick's essential lack of maturity.
Other good things about the show, in addition to the fine regular cast — Alan Rosenberg, Charles Malik Whitfield, Raphael Sbarge — included the wonderful cameos by Rita Moreno, as Lulu's mother, Henry Gibson (he of the flower and doggerel on Laugh-In) as a cold-hearted industrialist, and Farrah Fawcett, as a deeply troubled mother of a deeply troubled kid. There was even a very brief cameo by Will Ferrell as an earnest, talented but doomed guest lawyer at the agency.
Excellent actors, an involving story that continued over numerous episodes (with a cool theme song by The Wallflowers), set not in L.A., Vegas or New York but in also-ran Pittsburgh (where a tribute to the show was held in September). Show creator David Hollander, I read somewhere, is also a playwright, and he knows how character drives drama, and he made sure his characters were absorbing and realistic. It was a fascinating show to watch, beautifully acted and paced, and blessedly free of the moralizing, hero-making or humiliation you see in every other show. These were regular people, mostly trying to resolve their major life issues and be happy.
Just in that — in being a drama that tried to be entertaining and yet be true to life as it is really lived — it was uplifting, in spite of the often-somber story lines. The Guardian showed it was possible to write a weekly TV drama for mass audiences that is full of loose ends, unresolved problems, and ambiguity. Some of these ends were tied up for the last episode when it became clear CBS wasn't going to renew the show, but enough were left open that there would be plenty of drama left for many future episodes.
There's my appreciation/fan letter, many months too late. All I can say in conclusion that the show made many Tuesday nights at home special for Sharon and me, and we still miss it.

Picking up the jazz flag

It occurred to me this week that we Post critics rarely talk about jazz, so I'm taking it on myself to pick up the jazz flag and do that in this blog from time to time.
I did a good bit of jazz playing in high school, less so in college, but I've got a decent acquaintance with this native American art form, and I'll keep my eyes open for some good local jazz and write about it when I can.
Longer-time residents of this area will be aware that in the early 1990s, this was a better place to live when it came to cultural institutions. Back then, The Miami Herald still had Tropic magazine (which Sharon and I battled over each weekend), Mizner Park still had Liberties bookstore (very important before Borders and Barnes & Noble arrived), the Florida Philharmonic was doing first-rate Mahler (the orchestra's recording of the First Symphony, with the Blumine movement, is still my favorite), and Miami's WTMI was still an excellent classical and jazz station.
Without getting into all the things I miss about WTMI, for present purposes I'll note that I'd drive home many a night from my newspaper job and catch China Valles' Jazz Thing in the wee hours. The Maj talked a lot about all the jazz that was going on around here, and over the years I caught some local shows, including a great set or two from Dr. Lonnie Johnson down on Las Olas. I even called the Purveyor of Swirls once around 2 in the morning to thank him for playing a new CD by the tenor saxophonist Don Braden; I'd played with Don when he was an 18-year-old Harvard kid and in the band for an original musical I was helping out with at the Harvard Law School.
All of us were really impressed with Don's talent, and I was delighted to hear he'd gone on to get a band together and start doing some records. It was a joy to talk to China about the record and to thank him for keeping the jazz flame alive.
But that was then, and things are not so good now. I still continue to hope that someone will go ahead and fund, at a loss, a great arts station here that features classical and jazz. Probably we'll all have to got to satellite radio to get it, though.
In my quest for jazz, I started this past weekend close to home, dropping in at Florida Atlantic University on Saturday for about half of a concert by the FAU Jazz Band (I got the starting time wrong). Still, what I heard was some fine playing, particularly from tenor saxophonist Jeff Samuels, who had a big, confident sound for Matt Harris' Chop Suey; the young Peter Fernandez's alto solo in Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca, which started a little rough, but in which the latter half was dominated by a repeated, climbing figure that had a compelling logic and set up the next soloist admirably. Good things, too, from pianist Mauricio Garcia.
Wish I'd heard more of the concert, but I heard enough to make me want to return for another evening with Neal Bonsanti's band.
This also is the time of year in which there are any number of musical performances in venues from schools to churches by other amateur and professional groups as the holiday season gets under a full head of steam. It's not fair to hold a lot of these concerts to the same standard as the professionals, but still there are noteworthy programs that say interesting things about what their organizers think will engage local audiences.
Choosing at random this past Sunday — and because I live in Delray Beach — I stopped in at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in my town for a concert by the church choir and soloists consisting of a Handel organ concerto, a Schubert psalm setting, a Magnificat attributed to Pergolesi (but actually probably by Francesco Durante), and a true rarity, the original nonet version of Brahms' First Serenade.
FAU's Diana Akers gave a good account of the Op. 7, No. 3, Handel concerto as its organ soloist, and Edward Pierson sang with real authority in the Pergolesi/Durante. The Brahms was the centerpiece of the afternoon (four of the six movements were programmed), and while echoes of the familiar orchestral version perhaps showed why the composer felt it needed a broader canvas, the performance offered an unusual chance for listeners to hear how the 24-year-old Brahms was feeling his way toward his pastoral style and tackling the organizational challenges of a large instrumental work.
Hats off to Stuart Gardner for assembling this ambitious program, which proved to be a good way to pass a late fall Sunday afternoon.

Booknotes: Went to Levenger in Delray, also on Sunday afternoon, and caught some of the question-and-answer session with Anthony Bourdain, the celebrated chef-auteur whose Kitchen Confidential is a popular read around my house. Bourdain was there to inaugurate the arrival of Mitch Kaplan's Books & Books at Levenger. A quick browse through the small but deep selection of books now available there was heartening (though I'll still make pilgrimages down to Coral Gables to check out the original store).
And from the independents to the chains: Borders Books & Music has made its selection of nominees for its Original Voices Awards, and I was happy to see that one of them was David Bezmogis, a native of Soviet Latvia who moved to Toronto as a child. I reviewed his debut collection of short stories, Natasha, for The Post, and found it to be a beautifully crafted volume of tales built around a young man's search for identity. I'm looking forward to his next work with anticipation, and I recommend Natasha heartily.

Hilary Hahn's music

Picked up the latest CD by the young American violinist Hilary Hahn the other day. It's a well-played disc of 20th-century English music, featuring the Elgar Violin Concerto and Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending.
I own all of Hahn's CDs (except the soundtrack to The Village), partly because I've been following her career since I interviewed her back in 1997 for The Stuart News. Hahn has relatives in Vero Beach, and was at that time doing guest appearances with the Atlantic Classical Orchestra in Stuart, a chamber group.
She was only 17 when I talked to her, and had just finished recording part of her first CD, a disc of two Bach solo partitas and one of the sonatas. That seemed to me to be an unusually bold choice for a first record by an unknown violinist, but it became clear to me as we talked that she's a person of deep seriousness when it comes to her music, and that she loves Bach.
I enjoyed talking to her that afternoon. She was as nice as could be, warm and funny, with an adult gravity that comes with being very good at what you do from a very early age. She appeared to have a great career ahead of her, and so far, that's exactly what she's had.
My favorite recordings by her are the Bernstein Serenade — a violin concerto in everything but name, played with fire and depth, and one of the recordings that helped bring this wonderful work back to public attention — and the Shostakovich First Concerto. In the latter work, she is right in tune with the composer's special blend of melancholy, high seriousness and brute energy. It's a great performance that I find myself returning to frequently.
Which brings me to the shameless blog-rolling section of this entry.
Hahn does a Web site, www.hilaryhahn.com, which is among the more interesting artists' sites I've seen. One of its features is a road journal in which she writes what essentially is a long postcard from wherever she's playing, and takes good pictures to go with it (check out her Auckland, New Zealand, entry). Under her Opinions section, she's getting opinions from everyone else in the form of interviews with other musicians. She asks smart questions (and irreverent ones) and gets compelling answers.
Visiting the site last week I see that she's filed an opinion piece (under Itty-Bitty News) about the presidential election, and she's not too happy about the result. She makes a reasonable case, I think, and it's interesting to read what this 24-year-old American is concerned about, in particular the environment, which got virtually no serious mention to speak of in the campaign.
Here's some of what she says:

My discomfort with the outcome of the election was heightened by the crowd's response at the acceptance speech. Chants of what sounded like, "Glory, glory", and the rhythmic pumping of thousands of hands in the air frightened me to some extent (I may be alone in that.) The Vice President, drawing on the energy in the room, spoke of a renewed "mandate" from the American people. I'm sure some will respond by commenting that I, as one who did not get what I wanted, am overly sensitive. But perhaps I speak for others as well when I write that I felt steamrolled and unimportant, hurt, worried, and discarded. With a sense of unease, I think of the fact that any second-term administration has little motivation to reach out to its dissenters — and, theoretically, little to lose in pursuing its own agenda.

The site is a fascinating glimpse into the life and mind of a young, talented artist taking on the world, and her basic honesty and integrity are evident everywhere on these pages. It's well worth a visit, particularly if you're a young musician.
Hahn's site also is a reminder that there are plenty of fine young classical musicians out there making decent careers for themselves. You meet them all the time when you do reviews, and it's only when you return to the world at large that you remember classical music is supposed to be dying.
But it's not, and never will, because the music itself has a permanent appeal. People will always find something to cherish in great music that's hundreds of years old because it has something to say, even if all it says is: Wow, listen to this beautiful tune.
Hahn's career also reminds me that many of these musicians could really use some wonderful new music to play — or just good overlooked repertoire like the Stravinsky concerto, a crackerjack performance of which Hahn has recorded on a disc with the Brahms concerto.
Another of her CDs has the Barber concerto along with a new piece by the bassist Edgar Meyer. The Meyer concerto isn't very good, but it's encouraging that Hahn would take a nervy chance like this by recording an entirely new concerto, rather than sticking with the old chestnuts.
All in all, a career that's well worth watching.