By Helaina Hovitz

It’s a brisk Saturday morning in April, and a group of inner city students are rehearsing a musical of their own making at East Side Community High School on 12th Street and 1st Avenue.

This story doesn’t seem unique, at first, but the production isn’t your typical high school musical.

Among this group are teens who have endured abuse in all its forms, been kicked out of their homes because of their sexual orientation, and have become caretakers for their siblings because their own parents are addicts. The Possibility Project has brought them all together to sing about these and other experiences, hoping to help them transform the negative forces in their lives into means for positive change, raising awareness for these and other issues through the performing arts.

Throughout the ten-month school year, kids ages 13-19 learn to build relationships across differences, resolve their conflicts in peaceable ways, and engage in community improvement projects while writing and performing an original musical inspired by the stories of their lives. This year’s musical, “Home Free,” at El Museo del Barrio at 1250 Fifth Avenue, will be performed from April 25-28, and addresses the themes of poverty, bullying, homelessness, gun violence, and death, among other problems that most of the kids have previously never spoken about to anyone.

Photo by Christopher Smith

“These students go through traumatic life-altering events like abandonment and sexual abuse, and they blame themselves,” said Jeff Flowers, the program’s artistic director. “They think they’re alone until they get here and realize that other people have gone through something similar, and they see that there isn’t something inherently wrong with them.”

Not all of their young people are “troubled,” however, according to the program’s founder and president, Paul Griffin.

“The adolescent years are an emotional time, no matter what the circumstances, and the collision of vulnerability and responsibility can often play out in destructive forms,” said Griffin. “We try to bring together a diverse group, some who are struggling and some who are not, so they can learn from each other,” he explained.

Kids are selected for the program based on their availability, willingness to collaborate, and concern for various issues, rather than on talent or ability.

Isamar Ubiera, 18, a member of this year’s Production Team, said that the experience of hearing everyone’s story is always powerful and intense.

“You wouldn’t know these things happened to them, not even to your own friends, because it’s not something you’d normally talk about,” she said. “But we can’t change without knowing what the problem is.”

The next step is helping the teens figure out how to use what they’ve been through to create positive social change. The Production Team, a group of youth from the previous year’s cast, work with the staff to write the script for a show with six vignettes that relate to the youth’s personal stories.

“We believe our shows should be on the level of Broadway,” said Flowers. “People come in with low expectations because they’re kids. They think it’s a talent show, but it’s not. It’s risky. This show has edge.”

Because the themes are so intense, they must be dealt with carefully.

Photo by Christopher Smith

“You can’t just throw rape and violence at an audience,” said Kelly Claus, director of operations. “When you live in a hard world, it’s hard to see that hope is possible, but the show has to be about hope, too, not just hurt.”

Students also participate in Community Action Projects twice a year by choosing an issue of concern and designing a challenge to raise awareness for it. Last June, one group took a sex-ed game show to Union Square Park, and had no trouble finding participants wiling to answer questions about the effectiveness of a condom vs. the pull-out method.

Another group took their project up to 125th Street, fashioning a coffin out of individual cardboard tombstones, asking passerby if they’ve ever lost anyone to gun violence, and, if so, to write their name on the tombstone. Participation there was high, too.

Flunking out of school and often years behind, when young people see they can commit to the Project, they see that they also have the ability to follow through with school, which many participants ultimately go back and finish. Their grades improve, and practical skills like time management, goal setting and future planning also become part of their repertoire. For many, relationships with family and friends also improve.

“Even if I don’t feel like waking up on a Saturday, I don’t want to let my friends down,” said Ashley Rivera, 17, who attends East Side Community High School. “If I break my commitment, my classmates will look at me as someone who gives up too easily.”

Rivera, who lives on the Lower East Side, says that she is shy by nature and didn’t talk much before the program. Now, she is slowly coming out of her shell.

“I’m gaining the confidence to speak up,” she said.

Unless they join the Production Team, the program caps after two years of involvement.

Photo by Christopher Smith

“We don’t want them to become too dependent on us,” said Claus. “We want them to go out into the world and put what they’ve learned into action.”

The Possibility Project grew out Paul Griffin’s Washington, D.C. based City at Peace program, which he created in response to a lack of action ameliorating the rising tide of youth violence and racial division. Griffin moved to NYC in 2000 and began building the program here for the same reasons.

“These kids need a way to experience what they’ve been through as a way to understand the world around them,” said Flowers, speaking to the program’s ultimate goal. “Here, they find their purpose. We’re teaching them that they have choices…that there are possibilities out there for them.”

Dancers Warm Up Photo by Amy Eley

Lower Manhattan’s Dance New Amsterdam in danger of closing

Amy Roper Lyons jewelry

CRAFTS, ART FAIR AND OFF THE MAIN IN NYC

Ed Asner is still acting in his eighties. But his quick wit and unique outlook on life make him able to transcend the age gap. An entertainer for all generations, he has played endearing roles for the younger set such as Santa Claus in Elf and Carl in Up. But others will always remember him for his seven-year stint as journalist Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Now he has returned to Broadway to star in Grace with Paul Rudd, which is playing until Jan. 6.

You have seven Emmy Awards. Where do you keep them?
They’re scattered throughout the house. There are none in the outhouse.

You’ve come back to Broadway after 23 years. How has it changed?
It’s less grandiose. Penny-pinching has gone on everywhere—film, TV, life. And it certainly affects Broadway as well as every other element of showbiz.

Is Paul Rudd as funny as he is in movies?
No. I haven’t laughed at him yet.

Any funny set stories?
No. We’re so serious and dedicated. We’re growling most of the time about directors or writers, you name it. We really don’t have time. I could have said the same thing for the seven years at Mary Tyler Moore. It was not the laugh-and-scratch type atmosphere that you would expect from such a delightful show.

You came from LA to do this play. What do you like about living in New York?
I’m still searching.

You tweet very frequently. Do you write your own tweets?
No. My son does.

You whacked Barbara Walters’ tush on The View. Why did you do that?
To get a reaction from Barbara Walters like that. She reacted properly.

In your Facebook picture, you are holding up a “Vote Now” sign.
People should not surrender their right to vote. They should exercise it even though they can’t stand anybody. Even if they write in “none of the above.”

What is your advice to voters this November?
Hold your nose.

You do a lot of work with autism. Why do you think this is such a worthy cause?
Because I have a son who has autism. And I have a grandson who has autism. And I know the world’s attention must be focused on it and come to understand these people and to work for their betterment and greater ability to enter and function in society.

You played Santa Claus in Elf. Did Will Ferrell at least make you laugh?
Oh yeah. He’s an unbelievably dedicated actor. He made me the Santa Claus I am today.

What memories stay with you from your work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show?
Nothing but bliss.

You voiced the main character in Up. Did you think the movie would get so many accolades?
No I didn’t. I don’t know whether it was nerves or what. Its largeness and its prominence really didn’t gel on me until I saw it for about the third time.

When do you plan to retire?
Death must come before retirement.

What do you still want to do that you haven’t yet?
I want to see my kids ripen into old age. I want to see my grandkids mature and develop and become acceptable.

Bolshoi and Kirov vitality preserved 

Legendary Russian dancers show why they are legends in the new DVD Treasures of the Russian Ballet (ICA Classics/Naxos). It contains performances by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet and (then) Leningrad’s Kirov filmed by the BBC in London from 1956 to 1963, some on stage, some in the television studio.

The longest excerpt in the anthology is Act 1 of Yuri Grigorovich’s The Stone Flower, recorded during the Kirov’s debut London season in the summer of 1961. Yuri Soloviev was 20 and Alla Sizova 21 at the time they were filmed here. But for once we’re privy to young dancers not trying to merchandize their youth, but instead experiencing it. They create a portrait of young love that is irrefutable not only visually but artistically.

Alla Osipenko dances the role of a mythical mountain dweller who bewitches Soloviev’s character. Her role is filled with jumps to suggest ferality and brittle full stops enabling her unsurpassed arabesque to imprint itself. The preserved performance is a fitting birthday tribute to Osipenko, who turned 80 last week.

The Bolshoi’s Raissa Struchkova and Maya Plisetskaya: call them the Life Force ballerinas. Filmed here in excerpts from Cinderella, Struchkova is a quintessential embodiment of the vitality for which the Bolshoi was celebrated. Dancing Kitri in Don Quixote, Plisetskaya transcends soubrette clichés—or is what she’s really doing instead a revelatory distillation of the charm and power of the archetype? Her partner, Vladimir Vasiliev, like Soloviev, and the Bolshoi’s Maris Liepa and Mikhail Lavrovsky, show in this DVD the way they revealed to the world new possibilities for male ballet expression.

Galina Ulanova was a product of the Kirov but was transferred to the Bolshoi at the end of World War II. At 46, Ulanova is quite astonishing in the White Swan adagio from Swan Lake, captured during the company’s debut season in London in 1956. Her performance is technically imperfect by the standards of her day or ours, and yet at any calendar age or historical epoch Ulanova would be the kind of artist about whom quibbles are irrelevant. Every step she takes demonstrates a personal and masterly way of shaping a step, a phrase, a role, a larger metaphor.

Indeed, it’s not possible here to mention, let alone do justice to all the great performances in this collection—let me just say that everything on it is crucial viewing!

Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com 

BY VALERIE GLADSTONE

When Alonzo King established LINES Ballet in 1982 in San Francisco, few believed he could maintain a new company in the city where the San Francisco Ballet had long captured the area’s ballet audience. Moreover, King did not conform to the typical ballet artistic director—he grew up in Santa Barbara in a distinguished family of movers and shakers in the African American community, trained at both the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Ballet Theater and performed with Dance Theater of Harlem. Even more unlikely, he wanted to start his venture on the West rather than the East Coast.

Quickly, he proved all the doubters wrong.

Today, King is one of the top choreographers in classical contemporary dance, with a wide-ranging repertory that includes collaborations with numerous international composers, musicians and visual artists, including China’s Shaolin monks, actor Danny Glover and jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Plus, the company has an enviable tour schedule and a vibrant school.

It has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Edinburgh Festival, Montpellier Danse and the Holland Dance Festival, and King has been commissioned by the Swedish Royal Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, The Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hong Kong Ballet and North Carolina Dance Theatre, among others.

Asked the secret of his success, King says, “I try to choreograph beautiful works that resonate with universal truths.”

In LINES Ballet’s upcoming season at The Joyce Theater May 8-13, King’s choreographic gifts and widely heralded dancers will be on display in a program including Scheherazade, commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the centenary of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo and set to a new score by tabla master Zakir Hussain after Rimsky-Korsakov, and Resin, an exploration of Sephardic music with songs and field recordings from Yemen, Turkey, Morocco and Spain.

A true scholar of the world’s cultures and music, King mines relationships between diverse groups of people, bringing them subtly to light in works like those that will be presented at The Joyce Theater. The character of Scheherazade particularly fascinated him. He explains that she had to convince the ruler not to kill her and save her sisters by healing him with her voice.

“It wasn’t simply her stories,” he says, “but her voice. It transported him. Your voice is the key to who you are. I had to show this through movement, how her lovingness transformed him. In a sense, she represents the divine mother.”

While he likes the Rimsky-Korsakov score, he also thrives on working with living composers, and so asked Hussain for a new score. “It’s a partnership when I collaborate with a composer, just as choreographing is a partnership with my dancers. Artists are givers. They inspire me,” King explains.

Dancer David Harvey joined LINES five years ago. “Alonzo sees endless possibilities in dance and his dancers,” he says. “It makes it challenging but also rewarding—you never reach the point where you are finished.

“He’s never abandoned ballet; he’s committed to fulfilling its potential. He’s a purist in the best sense—no flash, no glitter, just honest and courageous dance.”

Wellness for Seniors

The elder support organization DOROT offers inexpensive wellness classes for seniors on the Upper West Side. This May and June, they will be holding regular sessions as well as one-time workshops to promote mental and physical health. On Tuesdays from 10–11 a.m., a licensed social worker facilitates a group chat to discuss memories and life experiences; from 12:15–2 p.m. on Tuesdays there is a “senior café” with coffee, tea and cookies on the 7th floor. On Tuesdays and Fridays from 11:30 a.m.–12:10 p.m., a martial arts instructor leads gentle exercise classes that focus on increasing immunity and spinal flexibility. There are also tai chi, stretching, Zumba chair and yoga classes available on a weekly basis. Other sessions and workshop topics include singing, meditation, movement, comedy, heart health, gardening and chats with doctors from Weill Cornell Medical Center. The wellness classes are $5 per class, with scholarships available. Participants should arrive 15 minutes before class starts and wear sneakers or flat rubber-soled shoes. All sessions take place at 171 W. 85th St., second floor. For more information and a complete schedule, call Katie Girardi at 917-441-3743. Homebound seniors can participate in many classes via phone.

West Side School Gets Grant for Arts

The Adolph Ochs School, P.S. 111M, was recently awarded a $50,000 grant to establish an educational theater and literacy program. The school, on West 53rd Street, is a federally designated Title I school, and 91 percent of the students’ families live below the poverty line. The grant from the Leonore Annenberg School Fund for Children will be used to implement a theater curriculum and drama studies in the early grades, in collaboration with the group Story Pirates, which uses kids’ ideas to create and perform skits and plays. The school is committed to using drama education to strengthen literacy and engagement in the classroom.

UWS Graduate on Olympic Team

Last month, the U.S. Olympic Fencing Team announced its new lineup, and a recent graduate of the Dwight School on the Upper West Side was among them. Race Imboden, who graduated in 2011 and took a year off to focus on fencing before attending Notre Dame, will be joining the team for the 2012 Summer Games in London. He qualified for the team after his fourth World Cup event in the Men’s Foil division. Imboden began fencing at age 9, after a stranger saw him playing with toy swords in the park and suggested the sport to his parents. He qualified for his first major international team by age 16 and earned a bronze medal in the 2012 Cadet World Championships. He’s won many competitions since, and earlier this year he was one of the youngest competitors to medal in the Senior World Cup competition. Imboden said that he’s thrilled to compete in England, his mother’s home country, and credits his parents’ support and sacrifice as well as The Dwight School’s flexibility for helping him achieve his Olympic dream.

Local School Fair

P.S. 9, at 100 W. 84th St. between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues, will be holding its annual Spring Fair on Saturday, May 19, from 11 a.m.–4 p.m. There will be rides and games for kids, crafts, science activities and a variety of food for sale. Proceeds from the fair support school programs.

Pesky Insects Topic of Town Hall

In some pockets of the Upper West Side, residents have been plagued by mosquito infestations in recent years, despite the city’s attempts to eradicate the populations by flushing the sewers and encouraging landlords to eliminate sources of standing water. Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, who said that she hears about this issue continuously from her constituents, will be hosting a town hall meeting on Thursday, May 17, from 7–9 p.m. at the Goddard Riverside Community Center, at 593 Columbus Ave., to address this problem as mosquito breeding season approaches. Pest management specialists and representatives from city and state agencies will be available to answer questions and share what they are doing as well as how residents can combat the itch-inducing insects. For more information, call Rosenthal’s office 212-873-6368 or email rosenthall@assembly.state.ny.us.

Brewer Intros Safety and Transit Bills

Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer introduced three new bills to the council last week, all focused on public safety and transportation. Addressing the recently renewed concern for the safety of hotel staff members, one bill would require hotel owners and proprietors to equip their staff with silent alarms. The two other bills are aimed at accommodating electric vehicles: One would make the installation of electric charging stands eligible for revocable consent from the city, intended to streamline the process and encourage investment in these structures; and the other would establish a pilot program to install 10 vehicle charging stations throughout the city. This would be followed by an analysis of their use to determine whether more charging stations would be utilized.

A new revival of Albee’s forgotten The Lady from Dubuque sheds light on the darkest of topics

In his signature work, Edward Albee asked “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” In The Lady from Dubuque, which Signature is reviving following an abortive 1980 New York run, the playwright opens his show with the question “Who am I?” Various permutations of this question will be asked over the course of this deceptive show, and while plenty of meaty nuggets are to be found, don’t expect any straightforward answers to that seemingly most basic of questions.

Sam (a superb Michael Hayden) is the initial character to pose this question, as part of a parlor game he and wife Jo (Laila Robins) are hosting for four of their friends (Catherine Curtin, Thomas Jay Ryan, Tricia Paoluccio, and C. J. Wilson) in their impressive modern home (John Arnone’s set decoration is gorgeous, somehow being both sterile and saliva-inducing). Jo is as gracious as she can be, given that she’s enduring the painful symptoms terminal illness, which she tells the audience in one of many moments of Pirandellian direct address with which Albee peppers his play.

The answer, as it were, to Sam’s “Twenty Questions” riddle is deceiving – he’s not one person but two. But Lady brings even cloudier issues of identity to the surface once the silky Elizabeth (Jane Alexander) and her cohort, Oscar (Peter Francis James) let themselves in to the household once everyone else has left or retired to bed. Elizabeth purports to be Jo’s mother, and though Sam insists she cannot be, that she bears no resemblance to his dying wife’s actual mother, Jo offers no resistance. Though cloaked in white (Elizabeth Hope Clancy designed the costumes), Elizabeth seems to be none other than Death incarnate, and Jo accedes to her imminent demise in making friends with her, embracing (literally) a new family as she weans herself off of her existing one.

One can see, perhaps, why Dubuque proved so confounding upon its original staging: it’s evasive and elliptical, and some dialogue that Albee thinks is smart is actually rather silly. And the second act return of the two supporting couples feels clunky. But the playwright has bigger themes in mind, and in the hands of director David Esbjornson (who also directed the Tony-winning Broadway run of Albee’s The Goat), the increasingly barbed, metaphysical flights of fancy feel instructive. There are life lessons here about who we are and what others do for us that should not be ignored. For instance, Sam loves Jo but can no longer help her; in fact, his mere touch only wounds his love as her body continues to punish and betray her.

Esbjornson also conjures deep performances from his ensemble, particularly Paoluccio as the outsider of this incongruous group of friends and Wilson as its gruffest member. Alexander is exquisite, all the more unsettling because of her constantly calm demeanor. Depending on how one views the play, either Elizabeth, Jo or Sam will be its true lead (for me, it’s Sam). And what’s important is the answers given – or lack thereof – as much as the questions. Who is asking them, and why? What do we ultimately need from one another? The longer Jo cleaves to Elizabeth (for Robins, forced to writhe and moan, Dubuque must be quite an endurance run), the more we in the audience question what we look for in the company we hold near and dear.

Kudos to the Signature’s players and Esbjornson in particular. In resuscitating Dubuque, they have proven that a play about death has plenty of vital signs.

Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque

At the End Stage Theater in the Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, Clinton; thru April 15, signaturetheatre.org. $75.00

The graffiti artist/rapper has packed up his gear and jetted out West. Don’t worry, he’ll be back to continue his mentoring work with Arts by the People. He’s just getting back to the newness of a city. Fourteen years in NYC will leave you with a warehouse of memories, which are great for a rainy day, but there ain’t many of those in LA. He’s working on his art based website Daylightcurfew and a new album, coming off the release of the Peter J produced Jackson P EP. “Two track beats, recorded at my place. It’s got a lot of looseness to it.” That looseness is rare in rap today. Overproduced white sound that ends up coming out like a brick of noise. For the idiots who are thinking awesome a brick of noise, try getting hit in the head with a brick sometime. There’s no message. No moral. CLUNK. Splat. Nada. Bling and bitches, because the bigger world don’t sell today.

Bisco thinks otherwise. And I’d have to agree.

You follow in the footsteps of other street artists turned rappers, KRS-One, Bigg Jus, etc. What have you learned from their trips? What sets you apart?
I can’t say I pay too much attention to learning from those experiences. I’m just on my own journey. I go back and forth between art and music all the time. It’s a rotation for me. I go as I go. I don’t look to others for lessons.

How do they inform each other?
There’s an audience on both sides. For me personally, they’re both releases. One’s external, one’s internal. One is conscious based, one is visual. When you’re writing and making music there’s more of a message. I was painting a lot in the mid-2000’s. Was doing a lot of walls in New York, but I wasn’t saying anything. Music attracted me because I could say more.

How has NYC inspired your music and artwork? How has LA?
I grew up romanticizing New York. Always. That place for me is the end all. After I lived in New York for 14 years-I loved it-but it’s not the same. LA is new now. It’s more inspiring in that regard, because every corner has something new. New York has a memory stamped on each block.

They’re both so different. I’m by the beach in LA, not in the city. It’s where I need to be right now. New York turned into a hamster wheel for me. I love the city and the people, but I feel like what I came for originally in the late 90’s, that energy, it’s not there as much. Maybe I’ve gotten older, but it’s not there anymore.

What’s your role in the organization Arts by the People?
My friend Gus, he reached out to me. Paul [the founder] was working with him. Working to bring up the art side of his programming. So Gus hit me up, we worked for a not-for-profit called Urban Art Beat. It started in the Bronx. I helped co-found it in 2005. Gus and I have just been back and forth on mentoring opportunities since then. Paul, the founder of Arts by the People, he’s a great guy. Really amazing energy. He brought me on. The way they run their thing is that they let you do your own thing and present it. We’ve been building a lot of different things. I feel like I’m just at the beginning.

What started your interest in graffiti?
Skateboarding man. Definitely skateboarding. When I was young the two went hand in hand, writing and skating.

In the last ten years street art has blown up to this high celebrity platform. Do you think the soul of it is still there? How do you even find clean space anymore?
I think the soul’s still there. It’s constant creativity no matter what. The space is hard. It’s dwindling in America, that’s for sure. There’s a fight for it. My root is more graffiti vs. the street art. I think the street art stuff is a whole other universe. The same rules don’t apply. I also don’t think the same spaces apply.

What are the rules of tagging?
There’s a hierarchy. Somebody will paint something, and then someone will re-paint over it, and you don’t do that kind of shit. It depends on the tag. Whose tag it is, y’know?

You’ve said your music is aurally like “therapy.” In what ways?
My style of writing is very cerebral. In the same way that I’d keep a journal or something, it helps me get the shit out of my mind. With age you change. In your 20’s it’s angst, but as you get older you have a lot more figured out. Less stress. My energy is different now. I don’t need that therapy like I used to. All creativity is therapeutic though. If I don’t make something I feel like I’m gonna go crazy.

Hip-hop has become this mass-marketed over produced junk trap, without any real messages. How do you see message driven hip-hop overtaking the platinum bangers rapping about things that don’t matter?
I don’t think it will, unless human consciousness evolves. Maybe the 2012 shift will make people smarter or change the value system. But as long as the value system is where it’s at now, it’s never going to be. But you still got Mos Def and people who are socially conscious. It’s not Lil Wayne, but I think those guys are good living artists. But we’re gonna continue to hear the junk rap on the radio until something big changes.

You run the website HYPERLINK daylightcurfew.com which is like an arts renaissance all it’s own. Do you sleep? And what do you look for in featuring content on the site?
LA got me sleeping better than New York to be honest. I keep making things. That’s the whole point of that site and the project. I’m surrounded by so many good people who do great work. Wherever I go, I find new people. It’s a no brainer giving it to the world. It’s between me and the other founders. I work with people whose aesthetics are similar to mine. No one’s vetoed anything. We’re putting quality work up there. We look for integrity. If it’s not there, it’s not gonna be respected. That’s my baby. It’s slowly growing. It’s cool.

Who do you look to for inspiration? Who’s one to look out for right now?
I’m looking at Known Gallery, they’re featuring a lot of dope stuff. I’m enjoying the West Coast and Europe more than the East Coast and Asia. Daylightcurfew isn’t a struggle, but it’s tougher for me, because I live in my own world, and I have a personal relationship with everyone I feature. I’m not looking at galleries everyday, they’re from my world. The more I make, the less I look outside the world. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that’s how it works.

What’re you working on right now?
I have a record that I just finished, produced by two Italian guys, BQ and Ram. I collaborated with them a few years back. When I was in Europe I wrote this whole record and worked with them on it. That’s the music step. I’m not working on any major art projects, just focusing on my work with Arts by the People right now. Just keeping up my skill set and enjoying the art.

If there were a guide book for creating a successful indie rock band, the first rule of thumb likely would read as such: “Whatever you do, do not attempt to cover the iconic bands of yesteryear, especially those which hold deeply nostalgic places in the hearts of music lovers around the world.” If this were the case, it would appear Canadian rock outfit The Darcy’s一whose  recently released sophomore album is a track-for-track cover of Steely Dan’s AJA一 have no intentions of sticking to the rules. The bright and brassy sounds of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s original album are barely recognizable beneath the eerily hushed vocals of lead singer Jason Couse and the bands full and deeply harmonic instrumentals.

The group has come a long way from playing in the college bars of Eastern Canada, where the four members; Couse, Wes Marskell, Dave Hurlow and Michael le Riche met while studying at the University of King’s College. With two albums under their belt in the span of less than 6 months, one more on the way and a gig opening for Bombay Bicycle Club at sold out shows around North America, the Darcy’s appear to be furiously accelerating into the indie fast lane. It doesn’t hurt that they’re signed to the incredibly packed roster of Arts & Crafts who are responsible for bringing us the likes of Feist, Phoenix and Broken Social Scene. Needless to say, The Darcy’s are in good company and appear to be living up to the hype. The Toronto-based band are playing their first  round of shows in New York tonight at the Music Hall of Williamsburg and Monday at the Bowery Ballroom.

I caught up with Jason on a break from riding in the back of an old Chevy on the West Coast leg of their tour.

Amy: From what I remember, The Darcy’s got off to a bit of a rough start before releasing your self-titled. Can you give us a little history of the group?
Jason: We started playing together when we were all students at King’s College in Halifax. It wasn’t an entirely focused project at that point, I think we were just playing to play and kind of figuring out what we were all about. It took us a couple years to start writing a bit more seriously and then we ended up in the studio with Murray Lightburn from The Dears, recording in Montreal. Following those recording sessions, we had a falling out with one of our band members, so he left the band when we had already done a lot of work on the album which kind of put us at a bit of a stand-still.

But then about three hours later, we just made the decision that we were gonna keep on truckin’ and that I would to step up on the lead vocal. We only had three or four days to get it together for a big Canadian Music Week showcase in Toronto. It was like a call to arms and we really ended up rallying together. In a way it was the best thing that ever happened to us, in that we became much more focused and it kind of distilled us down to the most dedicated members.

Once we got back into the studio it took almost three years to get that album finished. I think there was this cathartic moment when the album came out on Arts & Crafts in October of last year. It was kind of sweet because it was finally done to our satisfaction, and out, and we were still alive. We finally had some sort of tangible direction.

Where does the name come from?
Jason: I don’t know how to make this sound…not embarrassing. During the early genesis of the group, a number of us were in an English survey class, and we were reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. We had sort of this continuum of jokes about Mr. Darcy being Victorian lit’s most eligible bachelor. You know, Victorian chick lit. He’s very dark and mysterious and well-kept and he’s got a lot of secrets but he’s also a very focussed individual. Anyway, that was something we had sort of talked about when we were sitting around trying to come up with names for the band, before it really even existed. And then one day we were walking down the street and we saw a poster for a show that was coming up and it said that The Darcy’s were playing. We all sort of looked at each other and thought, “Oh, well I guess that name’s already taken.” Then we saw that it was our friend organizing that show and that he had in fact, both named us and booked us a gig without letting us know. So, we had a week to figure out a set and we played, and that was our first show.

Amy: You’ve been labelled as a lot of different genres, prog-rock, art-rock, indie…How would you describe your sound to someone who hasn’t listened to the album yet?
Jason: Oh boy. I always find it difficult to describe this because I find myself so close to the project in many ways that I find I don’t really know how it relates to other things. I understand the art rock, because we don’t necessarily adhere to conventional song structure or format. We’re not writing songs with massive hooks and choruses. Prog has a bad rep, and I don’t really ever listen to it. But the concept that a song begins in one place and fully develops, and builds tension towards some sort of release or some sort of catharsis, is something that we definitely think about. And again, that’s finding gratification in a song or in a sound that’s not necessarily derived from repeating a big banger of a chorus. I think people often just see that as alternative. But you know…there’s no glockenspiel.

Amy: Where do you think that puts the Darcy’s in the realm of the recording industry as a whole. Do you identify yourself with any other acts out there? You’re on a label with a roster of incredible artists.
Jason: That’s one thing that is really awesome about A&C, is that they have many different kinds of artists. It’s not a genre specific label which I think is really cool. But I think there is something similar about the artists on there. You know, they don’t necessarily sit in the category that they’re given. People are always able to try and grow within their own genre, discover and refine their aesthetic and always evolve. That’s something that we want to do.

On our first album, we made the kinds of sounds and songs that we thought we wanted to represent ourselves, but also was the kind of music that we wanted to listen to and couldn’t find anywhere to put into our headphones. But I think as time goes on and you learn about the recording process, and you learn more about yourself, and the kind of things that you like, that really develops. So I think we want to just explore the studio space a little bit more and explore what we can do with the equipment and the skills at hand and take that as far as possible. That sounds very lofty, I know…

No, no, it doesn’t at all! I know that you were all fans of Steely Dan, but what compelled you to go into the studio and record a track-for-track cover of AJA?
Jason: It was kind of a result of desperate times for us. In that whole process of losing a band member, where we ended up going back in the studio and re-mixing the self-titled album a couple times, it was just really long and drawn out. During the process we didn’t have an album to shop to labels and we couldn’t really play shows so we were just kind of stuck. It was just a crazy idea that popped up. But then we tried a song and then we tried another one. It was just kind of working. And then we had three down, and we thought… well, we’re three songs in out of seven…I guess we can’t back out now. We thought it would be done in four months and then it became eight. In that time we all kind of lost our sanity, and it became an extreme passion project, but in the end one of the most rewarding things we’ve done. It was such a far out idea that we really had to push ourselves in terms of coming up with new concepts and learning how to solve problems. We recorded at home and we never really thought it would get the kind of release that it did. But the label was really behind it and then we became really proud of it because it was our blood, sweat and tears for so long.

Is it true that AJA is intended to be the second album in a trilogy? Where do you go from Steely Dan and when can fans expect a release?  
Jason: Falling on the heels of AJA, we realized it had been a chance to see where we were as the four of us, and how the production side of things was going to work. And so recording all of that, we learned about our abilities in the studio. We just never stopped working. One day we weren’t working on AJA anymore and it was us working on new tunes. So we’ve been producing to the fullest extent, at least in our home studio, and working on a new album. We probably have about two dozen songs right now. We’re just going to kind of keep producing as much as we can until we find our selves in the studio, and then sort of distill it down to what we think is the best representation of where we are now. Which is really cool because you know, we’re the same people in a way but we’ve also grown so much in these past months and I’m really excited to hear how this will turn out.

You’ve come a long way in the past year since I last saw you guys play at the Steamwhistle Brewery in Toronto. What can we expect to see from your live performance?
Jason: The more we play, and the more we play to, you know…bigger crowds, things become a little bit more streamlined in the sense that we’re becoming more comfortable with the songs. We have more freedom to explore the performance aspect of it. I think what’s been really great for us on this tour is that we’re having a lot more fun on stage and we’re moving around more. We’re playing the AJA tunes which is really cool because they’re new for us. So since it’s fresh material for us, it seems to be a little bit more emotional than the set usually is. We’re just having a really great time right now.

Favorite show so far?
Jason: LA was really special. But I think it probably had to be Seattle. I mean, there’s so much history in that city, and that venue that we ended up playing at was one of the centers of the punk-grunge movement in that city when it really solidified itself. And it was just a really great crowd and the kind of commentary was really in tune with the kind of things that we think about when we finish a set. People seem to be understanding things the way we want them to be understood which is really rewarding.

This will be the bands first time playing in New York? What does that mean to you guys?
Jason: It’s something we’ve all wanted to do for years. Years ago when I decided I wanted to be in a band, you know, I never thought I’d be playing the Bowery. We’re not headlining but it’s still super exciting. We’re all really, really, really looking forward to it.

Someone the other day was asking if it’s nerve-racking playing for bigger crowds all the time. But my response to that was that it’s much harder to play to a small intimate group of people who are being extremely critical of you, where as these shows the rooms are big and full and everyone seems to be very encouraging. If you’re standing in front of a thousand people who really want you to do well and want to hear what you have to share with them, it brings a lot out of you. For that to be a reality in NYC potentially…that feels really good.

Is there anything fun you’ve been doing to kill time on tour? Any good books you’ve been reading?
Jason: Wes and I have been reading through a bunch of Cormac McCarthy’s work. It’s very essential and it’s great escapism from our life and situation. You know, the last thing I would want to do would be to read a book about a band on tour right now. So to read something about someone who’s looking for lost horses in the deserts of Mexico is a nice break. We also play road hockey. We travel with sticks and construct some make-shift nets. it’s a great way to sort of off-set any frustrations or energy that can be dispersed within the confines of our daily schedules.

Top 5 most played songs on your iPod?
1) How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep: Bombay Bicycle Club which is a sweet tune and awesome that we get to hear it every night.
2) Lovely Blood Flow by Baths (that’s a sweet jam.)
3) Small Time Shot Away by Massive Attack feat. 2D from Gorrilaz
4) Pretty Pink Plastic Bags by Gorrilaz
5) Babylon Sisters by Steely Dan because it’s got great lyrics about driving down Sunset towards the sea. When we were in LA the other day and we were crossing sunset blvd, I just ripped a quick right turn so we could drive west, just for a minute. I made someone put it on immediately.