Trawler Fall 2021

Fall and Change Submitted by Margit Resch “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” I feel just like the protagonist from Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, although for different reasons. Anne loves the time of year, fall, when nature breaks out in eye-busting colors, when birches turn “as golden as sunshine,” maples are “royal crimson,” and cherry trees become “dark red and bronzy green.” Of course I also love fall’s sartorial splendor, when leaves take wing and float in the air as radiant as spring flower petals. After all, according to Camus, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

But this year I am really looking forward to the return of October because that’s the month when the concert season of the Fripp Island Friends of Music will commence. Yes, you heard right. After a year of silence, we will entertain you with a fabulous series of concerts and, as always, with happy-hour after the performance.

I am not sure how the committee, responsible for composing FIFOM’s musical menu, chose the fabulous performers for this coming season. The committee members must have been inspired by the different and vibrant hues of autumn because our program is so delightfully varied and colorful.

We are going to start our 37th year of concerts in the Community Centre on Sunday, October 17 with a burst of colorful tunes performed by Hotlanta: “Jazz with a Southern Accent.” You may have heard this famous musical group in Atlanta or somewhere else in the south and beyond. Hotlanta will transport us back to that early American jazz called Dixieland with songs like “Hard Hearted Hannah” (the vamp of Savannah!) or “Sweet Georgia Brown” (with her “crazy feet that dance so neat.”) You remember musicians like Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, … Well, come on, drum it out of your memory: Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, on and on.

On November 17, the Knific ensemble, composed of Tom, Renata and their offspring Gene, will dig deep into America’s musical past with their instruments-bass, violin and piano, respectively. The Tom Knific Trio, for short, will fill the autumn air with a repertoire they call “The Great American Songbook,” a collection of classics that we all adore. And you will love the trio’s unusual renditions of popular tunes. All three performers are steeped in the fluid world of music. The parents taught at Western Michigan University, and all three have arranged and composed music. They have played together and separately with famous musicians in illustrious venues all over the world.

I also have to rave about the performers who will entertain us in the new year, 2022. They are all eminently rave-able. Just look at our duo performing on January 30. Michele Patzaki is not only a fabulous soprano whose operatic voice is at home in the highest and lowest registers and has been celebrated in concert halls and opera houses all over Europe and the US, but she is also a director, educator and producer. She will be accompanied by John Sawoski, a multi-keyboardist, orchestrator, musical director and composer, who just released a piano album called “Cinema Amore: Movie Love Themes and Other Classics.” He might just play a few for us.

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