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By
David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music
Critic
Photos by
Elizabeth Robertson
Inquirer Staff Photographer
A baby grand
piano, a shelf full of books, Christmas tree
lights, New Orleans food and live classical
music by a living composer. Life is good - at
least for a few hours - at the André Café Acoustique in blighted downtown Chester, amid
what could be viewed as a whisper of an urban
comeback.
The occasion
was a benefit concert for the cafe, in its
capacity as the Chester Performing Arts Project,
by violinist Kurt Nikkanen and composer/pianist
Steven Gerber, who drove several hours from New
York. "An unusual and wonderful space" was
Gerber's assessment of the cafe, decorated with
paintings and photos by area artists.
Approaching
the corner of Edgmont Avenue and Fifth Street in
Chester, the usual urban rhythms are markedly
different, if only because they're faint.
Friday-night street traffic is eerily scant in
this city where the population has dropped by
half since 1950.
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André Café Acoustique is a bright haven for the arts in
Chester, a city with a generally gloomy outlook. The
cafe was opened three years ago by jazz pianist
Paul Fejko. |
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Near the cafe's outdoor
tables, sidewalk vendors quietly sell gold chains and
artificial flowers. Because it's summer, all the cafe's
windows are open; sounds of street basketball and smells
of passing cigar smoke waft in. From the cafe's
loudspeakers, the music wafts out.
"I think downtown
Chester is perfectly fine, but that's me. I'm not easily
bothered by things. I'm a contrarian," says Paul Fejko,
the noted jazz pianist in Philadelphia fringe circles
who opened the cafe three years ago, and pads around the
nearby sidewalk in bare feet and a tie-dyed
T-shirt.
"I'm very much of the philosophy that if you build it,
they'll come."
And they did on this
recent night - 15 or so from Haddonfield, Philadelphia
and Swarthmore. Jazz concerts, like the July 20
appearance of the sextet Infinity, are likely to be
packed (the place will hold about four dozen); tonight,
classical music has mainly attracted Fejko admirers from
Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church in Philadelphia, where
he's resident organist. But the program was one that
those in the know would consider worth the drive.
Nikkanen's excellent
Bartok recordings, concerts around the world with
composer John Adams, and solo work with the New York
City Ballet make the prospect of hearing him play Bach's
Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin in G minor in a
club setting appetizing. Gerber, who has collaborated
for years with Nikkanen in recordings, responded to the
freewheeling atmosphere with his own witty take on
cocktail piano music as well as fantasies on Greek folk
songs.
It was a heady,
sophisticated concert, ending with what was probably the
Chester premiere of Arvo Part's prayer-like Fratres.
The concert had
two-way missions. Classical music has been a starting
point for urban renewal in communities from Newark,
N.J., to Camden thanks to its loyal, moneyed audience;
like many musicians, Gerber is keen to support Fejko's
new-music sympathies, which have been part of his many
musical incarnations in and around Philadelphia.
The cafe, in return,
was out to make audiences feel warmly welcome during the
40-minute intermission. Congenial and poised, cafe
managing director Donald Newton announced he'd picked
tomatoes from his garden that day and created a salad to
serve alongside Creole dishes from L'
Essence de New
Orleans, a restaurant opened up the street by Hurricane
Katrina refugees. One of the town's assemblymen chatted
outside.
How far Chester has
to go is suggested by contrasts with relics of what it
was: the majestic, WPA-era post office building down
Edgmont Avenue, still bearing a "fallout shelter"
placard from decades past, or the charmingly retro sign
- "Chester Arms Pharmacy, Free Delivery" - that framed
Fejko's building in the years before the shipbuilding
industry declined and took the town with it. The city
virtually gave the building to Fejko in 2002; it had
simply been abandoned, and, thanks to broken windows,
was only accumulating pigeon droppings.
Fejko's plan was to
create as many as six performing arts spaces in the
town, in hopes of forming the sort of artists' nucleus
that has revitalized numerous urban neighborhoods, among
them Philadelphia's Northern Liberties and Old City. That
larger plan appears to be dead in the water for lack of
money, he said. But in the meantime, "I've had a Swedish
folk fiddler in here. I've had a theater group. . . ."
For information on programming at the André Café
Acoustique: 609-462-9000 or
www.andre-cafe.com
Contact music critic David
Patrick Stearns at
dstearns@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at
http://go.philly.com/davidpatrickstearns |
