Food you can get anywhere – but where will the music go?

NICOLE PESCE AT MY FLORIST CAFE

I’m just catching up with the news that My Florist Cafe has closed its doors. The restaurant at McDowell and Seventh Avenue was a popular hangout for Bohemians and the people who like to watch Bohemians for nearly 20 years. A story in the Arizona Republic Oct. 1 claimed the recent growth of downtown Phoenix had provided too much competition for My Florist, and maybe that was true apropos food and drink.

But where the heck can you find another Nicole Pesce? Pesce is the pianist who for the last ten years of My Florist’s existence lent it her fifteen fingers and a repertoire that comprised more than 10,000 pieces of music from Rachmaninoff and Gershwin to Radiohead and Coldplay. She’s the the only cocktail pianist I know who can somehow convincingly segue from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky to Super Mario Bros.

Word has it she’ll continue her afternoon gig playing high tea at the Ritz Carlton uptown, but I always think of her serenading post-theater and post-concert crowds with the sort of music that keeps the magic going late into the night. Let’s hope she finds a nighttime gig soon.

Click here for a YouTube video of Nicole’s take on “The Pink Panther,” posted about a year ago to my old blog at ShowUp.com.

– Ken LaFave

A world of music/The “C” Word

In case you blinked and missed it, the Valley last spring became home to the largest collection of world musical instruments in…well, the world. The Musical Instrument Museum (The MIM), on Tatum Blvd. just south of the 101, is an amazing place to spend a day viewing and listening to instruments created by peoples all over the globe.

And you will need a full day, or most of one. It’s astonishing to see how many variations cultures can make on the same idea – how varied are the plucked string instruments of, say, India, Korea and Sweden, or the flutes of Africa and Native America. The audio machine you carry with you at the Museum automatically plays clips of whatever instrument you are viewing, so you hear the kora or the gamelan or the grand piano it as you see it.

Experiencing these different instruments with their range of tunings and timbres prompts the question, “Does what people hear in their heads determine how a culture makes and tunes its instruments? Or do the instruments get made, shaping how the people hear?” Unanswerable, I suppose; a relative of nature-or-nurture.

There’s a room where you can see one of Eric Clapton’s guitars and the piano on which John Lennon wrote “Imagine.” For classical geeks, there’s Lang Lang’s piano and one of Lenny Bernstein’s batons – as close to an “instrument” as a conductor might have. There’s also a hands-on room where my sons and I recently spent probably way too much time playing harps, drums, and that favorite of old-time horror movies, the Theremin.

If you haven’t been there yet, put a visit on your must-do list.

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Congratulations to The Phoenix Symphony and Phoenix Theatre for daring to use the “C” word: Collaboration. The Symphony and PT united to produce a semi-staged version of The Music Man last week, and they’ve just announced they’ll kick off each of the next two seasons with similar co-productions.

Way to go! The days of trying to get the biggest piece of a limited audience pie are gone! Gone! (“Gone with the hogshead, cask and demijohn…” Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.) It’s been replaced with the need for arts groups to work together to bring more folks under the arts & culture umbrella.

More, please.

– Ken LaFave