Cindy and I spent whirlwind weekend in Pittsburgh with our son, Patrick, and his wife, Jamie Agnello, both of whom have embedded themselves in the city's rich art scene. He in music, she in theater, voice work, and more.
After they finished up work on their day jobs on Friday, we went to hear Patrick's quartet play at the Con Alma jazz venue.
The next night we went to the workshop of James Simon, a well known Pittsburgh sculptor, who hosted an unusual musical event in the courtyard next to his workshop, which is filled with finished and somewhat finished works.
The music was by Bombici Akustic, which performed festive tunes from the Balkan region (description here and here). It featured Ben Opie on the soprano saxophone, Rich Randall on tapan (a Macedonian outdoor drum), Andrew Hook on sousaphone, Colter Harper on guitar, and Patrick Breiner on the C melody saxophone.
The music has complex time signatures in measures of 7, 9, and 11 rather than our more familiar 2/4 or 3/4.
Both Colter and Rich are ethnomusicologists. Colter taught at the University of Pittsburgh and now at the University at Buffalo, while Rich teaches at Carnegie Mellon.
On Sunday we took in a Pirates-Mets game at PNC park. It was pretty hot. The game went four hours. I've seen the Pirates play at the old Forbes Field in the 1960s, Three Rivers Stadium in the 1970s, and now the new PNC Park.
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| PNC Park. A fan who remembers one of the Pirates greats. |
On the way to the ballpark, we walked through Randyland, a quirky art museum, and had a chance to have a bit of a conversation with the unique Randy Gilson, who has created an outdoor museum of found objects and has transformed many of them into colorful shapes.
Randy is all about collecting the objects we manufacture through mass production and then throw away. He puts them into a context that makes you notice these objects and their potential for artistic expression. The museum itself is one of those old things (a building) in the old part of town that might have been torn down and thrown away.
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| Randy has restored this house in his own unique style. The outdoor museum is in the lot alongside. |
This video captures a lot of the flavor of the museum.
We also visited the Frick Museum. Great stuff by Rubens, Fragonard, and others. They had a display with the history of women's fashions for sports.
I also liked their Car and Carriages Collection.
Pittsburgh is a pretty cool town.
