The ghost of Miles Davis haunted an old Vaudeville theater — and racked up some coins for a modern-day mayoral campaign.
A jazz quartet summoned Davis’s classic cool-jazz composition “All Blues” at a fundraiser for mayoral candidate Henry Fernandez. The musicians performed Tuesday night from the stage of the restored Lyric Hall, a one-time Vaudeville hall in Westville village.
Frontman Chris DePino substituted a chromatic harmonica for Davis’s trumpet, riffing off the piano playing of New Haven-born jazz legend Donn Trenner. (Click here to read about their collaborative friendship.)
DePino, a former train conductor and then GOP state chairman-turned-lobbyist who has developed a thriving side career as a musician, played dual roles — musical arranger, campaign fundraiser — in an evening that mixed music with politics.
Former state House speaker Jim Amann, now a lobbyist for the film and gaming industries, declared himself undecided in New Haven’s mayoral race. He said he showed up Tuesday night “because Chris DePino wanted me to meet Henry. I do love Toni” Harp.
He organized the event for Fernandez, one of seven Democrats seeking to succeed retiring two-decade incumbent Mayor John DeStefano. DePino lined up the quartet, which included bassist Dave Daddario and drummer Thom Devino. He said he sold about 55 tickets at $100 apiece plus $250 full-page ads in a program booklet to Toad’s Place, DeMilo & Co. used-auto parts of Hartford, Edge Technology Services of North Haven, and DePino’s own East Shore-based lobbying and insurance-adjusting businesses.
Roughly half the ticket-buyers showed up for the concert. After a cocktail-schmooze hour (during which the candidate chatted with Sandra Trevino of Junta and Paul Wessel, above) …
…Fernandez took the stage to make the case for public support of the arts as part of his overall “One City” campaign theme. “The arts are a central part of bringing us together … enabling us to see ourselves through the eyes of others,” Fernandez said. “The arts help define us as a city.”
Then Fernandez joined the audience, and the DePino-Trenner quartet launched into “Days of Wine & Roses.”
Through Davis’s “All Blues” (click on the video at the top of the story to listen) and through a haunting rendition of New Haven-based Czech emigre Laco Deczi’s “Atlantis,” DePino placed a little-appreciated instrument in the spotlight: the chromatic harmonica. He has studied the instrument with rigor since his days conducting (and performing on) Metro-North trains from 1972 through 1997.
The widely used “diatonic” harmonica is limited to one key. It often functions as an accompaniment other instruments, heavy on rhythm (like a chugging train on blues songs) and bent 7th notes for rock and roll. The chromatic, on the other hand, has a slide that enables the player to change keys and notes, infinitely increasing the instrument’s range to handle genres like jazz and classical. It has the same musical range as a flute. This infinitely increases its range and scope of music that can be played.
In a way, chromatic players are horn like players. They can take the lead and soar across keys in a single riff. Stevie Wonder may be the best known mainstream pop star to make a chromatic sing. DePino considers himself a disciple of the father of the jazz harmonica, Toots Thielemans.
There was no trumpet or saxophone in sight at Lyric Hall Thursday night. DePino’s chromatic was the horn section, slipping up and down jazz scales to improvise on “All Blues” or to capture the intricate melodies and variations in Deczi’s “Atlantis,” communicating wordlessly with old-pro keyboardist Trenner, who picked up on DePino’s riffs, then roamed off into fields of own.
Lifelong civic activist Ralph Marcarelli recalled that his grandfather once held a mechanic’s lien on the old Lyric Hall — back in 1905.
Gallery owner Gabriel DaSilva, the neighborhood’s unofficial mayor, schmoozed with Lyric Hall owner John Cavaliere and Westville’s Gary Spinner.