Performance

Gary Tischler • November 6, 2012

“Invisible Man,” Oren Jacoby’s adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s iconic and National Book Award-winning novel of a nameless black man’s experience in and of America, is a wonder to behold.

In the novel’s incarnation as a play, now at the Studio Theatre, directed by Christopher McElroen, co-founder of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, in a co-production with the Huntington Theatre Company, you find yourself thinking and feeling on any number of levels—and wondering about the rest of the audience.

Gifted young actor Teagle F. Bougere says, “I am an invisible man,” intoning the opening words of the novel which remains a classic of American and African-American literature. It is a stylistic landmark, a powerful experience in reading. And, with some critical caveats, it’s an equally powerful but also very different, theatrical experience.

Bougere plays a young black man in the 1920s or early 1930s, not yet graduated from a so-called Negro college, who comes to live in Harlem in search of work and identity. “Invisible Man” as a novel is high-style, almost surreal and certainly poetic. It’s not really a naturalistic work; it’s episodic, a novel of experience. The experience, the biblical and harsh lessons that come from it, is the essence of what it was, and sometimes still is, to be black in America. In the invisible man’s world, grandfathers are freed slaves, the poor live in squalor, and education, as preached by the gospel of Booker T. Washington, is a vehicle for advancement, if not equality.

What’s remarkable about the play is adaptor Oren Jacoby has managed to create a play functioning with the words of the novel. Given the high intensity, rolling, often eloquent and thundering, poetic and even abstract nature of Ellison’s writing style, that’s no small feat. There’s little that seems naturalistic about the way the characters—with all the actors, except Bougere, playing several parts—speak. A certain formality, a poetic distance characterizes how characters—black and white—speak, there’s precious little slang or colloquialism here. It’s always, by way of example, “perhaps” not “maybe.”

By the time the young man makes his way to New York, he’s already lost a few illusions—he receives a college scholarship from the white aristos in his southern community, but not before having been forced to be part of a smoker in which blindfolded black men strike out at each other for the entertainment of the white swells. After he accidentally introduced a kind, wealthy trustee to the more sordid examples of black poverty, he’s expelled from school by the wheeling and dealing school president and sent to New York with a bogus letter of introduction.

In Harlem, he gets a job at a paint factory which specializes in a whiter-than-white paint. “You mean white is right, right?” he asks a co-painter. He’s injured in a factory explosion after a fight with his foreman. He’s helped by a kind woman who puts him up in her modest home. Then, after witnessing an eviction of a black family by an Irish cop, he spontaneously discovers a gift for oratory, stirring up a crowd, talking about “the dispossessed.” That feat attracts the attention of a leftist group of organizers called the brotherhood, strongly resembling the active Communist Party of the time, which many Americans, including Ellison and his fellow novelist Richard “Black Boy” Wright found, for a brief time, attractive.

But the experience ends in disaster—for his friends, for the black community of Harlem and for whatever visibility the man might have thought he still had.

The production is haunting, even beautiful. Bougere is passionate—at turns distant and feverish—as the nameless, invisible man. The staging is stunning. When we meet him the hero lives in a small basement apartment, illuminated by hundreds of light bulbs, making it seem like a consecrated carnival booth. The set by Troy Hourie is remarkable: it doesn’t just shine with lights but is a constantly moving back drop of historical black and white imagery.

The rest of the cast—the intense, lean Brian D. Coats, who plays the grandfather and other parts, the sly coquettish Julia Watt as an enticing white woman, Edward James Hyland as both the well-meaning trustee and a short-tempered Irish cop, and Johnny Lee Davenport in his turn as the idealistic Tod Clifton—leave indelible impressions.

The play—as a drama, not a novel—comes in a way to a halt, and we’re left with the thought, as he insists, that “who knows, on a lower frequency, I speak for you.”

You’re also left with some other thoughts—what this play and that novel mean today in the age of a black president, how it might resonate, say, in the Chicago teacher’s strike; what it has to tell us in this borderline, hateful campaign, what it and its resonating language might sound to young black kids. Given the audience, a full house, was generously 90 percent white, you hope Ellison does indeed speak to and for all of us. Because in this city and in this America, there is a growing divide, and there are still invisible people.
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Gary Tischler •

The performing arts—all of them-are all about music, movements and moments that add up to magic.
In our second fall prevue, we offer selective looks at the offerings on our varied stages, and venues in the realm of opera, dance, music of all sorts, as well as a rich series of spoken word events, discussions, talks, readings in prose and poetry.

Sondra Radvanovsky, the great American soprano, talks about her title role in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena”, which opens the Washington Opera season, followed by Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”.

Washington Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre talks about the company’s season opener, just in time for Halloween, of “Dracula”. We’ll look at the annual Dance Velocity events, and upcoming offerings from the Washington Peforming Arts Society, and we’ll have a sampling of Washington’s musical offerings, from the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, to the Embassy Series, to the star-studded concert celebrating America’s legendary folk and people’s music man Woody Guthrie. We’ll talk about the various voices on stage, including David Sedaris and Fran Lebowitz and Frank Rich and Billy Collins at the Music Center at Strathmore, and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Threthewey at the Library of Congress, giving her inaugural reading.

The picture, we think, ends up being a mosaic of the richness of Washington’s cultural offerings in the performance arts, and in the visual arts.

Click here for the following article on performance: Radvanovsky Takes on the Star-crossed ‘Anna Bolena’

Click here for the following article on performance: A Diva and a Don Start Things Off in a Rich Washington Opera Season

Click here for the following article on performance:Dance, Dance, Dance

Click here for the following article on performance: Music, Music, Music and More Music

Click here for the following article on performance: Readings and Conversations, from Strathmore to Folger
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Gary Tischler •

Well, we’ll be doing the songs I’ve done over the years, from the beginning until now. We’ll mix it up a little, but they’ll be songs people know, “ Emmylou Harris said in a phone interview about her upcoming August 15 concert at Wolf Trap in a matched set with singer-song writer John Prine, another enduring voice.

The songs—could be the matchless “Boulder to Birmingham,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him” or songs from her last and perhaps most intimate album, “Hard Bargains,” for which Harris wrote almost all of the songs. Could be something like “Pancho and Lefty” or the achingly familiar “One of These Days.” Lots to choose from in a 40-year-career.

Her voice over the phone is matter-of-fact elusive, due to a weak connection, but the accumulated stuff is pretty clear—it’s hard to imagine Emmylou Harris being anything else than the singer she is, or at least that’s the way she sees it. “I’m not sure I could have done anything else,” she says. “This is what I do, who I am. It’s complicated, sometimes, but I’ve been doing this all my life and will be doing it all my life.”

When you hear her sing—in a concert at venues as different as the Music Center at Strathmore or Wolf Trap— the presence and voice is clear as undiluted spring water, flowing. You can hear her life in the songs, the changes, the losses, the adding on of different kinds of music so that whatever she does, there’s always surprises, or things that have never gone away.

“I try to keep things simple when I write,” she says, and it sounds both true and a little too modest. Singing her own songs, or that of others, you hear the spirit of something grainy, pure dirt and wood American, a little cowboy, a lot of unrefined, raw country, the purity of folk with touches of rock and rockabilly, bluegrass and—when she’s of a mind—corner-piano, Broadway, break-your-heart brassy ballads. You can catch the looks, changing, over the years from her album covers, the pitch-black long hair, now turned white, the cheekbones. Now at 65, thrice-married with grandchildren, she looks as magnetic as ever. She looks like a good witch, in some ways. The voice is a little changed, according to her.

“Well, I don’t think I can quite hold the high as long as I used to,” she says. “You lose some things, gain some things. It’s what it is. You adjust, you find new ways, new music, and sometimes you can be more direct.” It’s something you could honestly disagree with her about—life has added some rich, tremulous and heart-probing stuff to her voice, upon listening.

“You know, you always reflect, think of who you were and what’s happened, it informs what you do,” she says. “I can look back when I started out, I was a product of the ‘60s, you know, folk singers and rock, and that stuff. You’d hear country music and sort of treat it with contempt. We didn’t get it, you know.”

With her parents living in the Washington suburbs, Harris famously sang at the Childe Harold in Dupont Circle, now defunct and re-arranged into a different place. “It was a different time,” she said. “I lived a few blocks from the place.”

Her attitude, and quite a few other things, changed when she met Gram Parsons in D.C. He was the legendary and charismatic leader of the Flying Burrito Brothers who was starting a solo act and looking for a girl singer, and that would be Emmylou Harris. The Parsons-Harris relationship is the stuff of musical legend in some ways—people talk about not in the rumor sort of way, but in the sense that Parsons—as close friend, mentor and inspiration helped her emerge with all her gifts firing. “He had a huge impact on me, he inspired me, he educated me about country music, its roots and what it could be, in its basic unadorned ways.”

Parsons died of an accidental drug overdose in 1973, and the shock of that, the hole in her heart, you suspect, is still there. “Sure, he’s with me, he changed my life, and it was a hard, hard loss,” Harris says. He’s in the early “Boulder to Birmingham” and in the song she wrote for “Hard Bargains,” “The Road” as in : “I can still remember every song you played/long ago when we were younger and we rocked the night away.”
“Hard Bargains” also features a song called “Big Black Dog,” which is an outcrop of another passion of hers: the love of dogs, rescuing dogs, being with dogs. Harris runs Bonaparte’s Retreat, a non-profit rescue operation which she runs out of her home Nashville. The “Big Black Dog” in question and music is one Bella, a mix “of just about every breed you can a think of,” who travels with her when she tours in her bus.”

“I can’t believe I never did that before,” she says about traveling with a dog. “It is, I don’t know, such a gift, the companionship of a dog. It’s soothing, full of love.”

She seems to have a gift for easy and long friendships, a natural affinity for musical collaboration. Look her up, and you’ll find almost everybody that’s ever picked up a guitar and banjo, pounded on drums or sung songs for a living in Nashville listed in the “worked with” category.

Harris—while her life has surely been dramatic—isn’t the type of person that get’s talked or whispered, or yacked about a lot about as a star, or god-forgive-them, super-star. She’s the kind of singer-songwriter-performer you remember just a little after the last note is gone as well as years later.

John Prine and Emmylou Harris, Aug. 15, Wolf Trap, Filene Center, Vienna, Va. — www.WolfTrap.org.

Gary Tischler •

Violinist Joshua Bell is no longer the boyish phenomenon of the classical musical world. Now 44 – and still boyishly handsome and charismatic – Bell is a bona fide superstar in his world, which includes a host of other stars, from Yitzhak Perlman to Hilary Hahn.

These days, Bell continues to keep a hectic travel schedule and performing schedule that will include a Nov. 1 performance at the Music Center at Strathmore, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at 8 p.m.

With Sam Haywood on the piano, he’ll be performing works by Schubert (Rondo for Piano in B minor, Op. 70) Strauss (Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat Major, Op. 18), and Prokofiev (Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94).

Bell is by now a familiar visitor to Washington concert halls and performing arts venues, having played often at the Kennedy Center and at the Music Center at Strathmore since it arrived seven years ago.

“Each offers pleasures and challenges for a musician and they do for me,” Bell said in a telephone interview. “Like many musicians, I admire the acoustics and the environment at Strathmore, it creates a kind of intimacy and sound that’s rare. And of course, the Kennedy Center is a very special place for me. Every time I come here, it’s something of a homecoming for me. I was here for the first time at a Kennedy Center Honors when I was only 17, so each occasion, it’s something comfortable and welcoming for me.”

In the middle stages of his career, Bell still likes his challenges, and his tastes remain eclectic. In 2011, he created one of the finest amalgams of classical and pop music ever recorded with “Joshua Bell at home with friends”. Home is a two-floor penthouse in New York that includes a recording studio, and his friends were folks like Sting, Jeremy Denko, Josh Groban, Kristin Chenoweth, Frankie Moreno, Jonathan Gunn, Regina Spector, David Finck, Anoushka Shankar and the late Marvin Hamlisch. The music was rangy from “My Funny Valentine”, to “Look Away”, Spector’s “Left Hand Song”, music from “Porgy and Bess”, to Sergei Rachmoninoff to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and others. The result was bliss.

“I loved doing that, of course, but I don’t think that’s going to be indicative of where I might be going,” he said.

Prior to that he had also participated in a cultural experiment which saw him playing a very expensive violin at a Metro Station during rush hour, performing Brahms, documented in a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post Magazine story. Bell got meager recompense, and was rarely engaged by passers by, few of whom stopped. “Well, it was interesting experiment,” he said.

Lately, he’s taken on a major challenge when he was named the new music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the venerable and conductor-less chamber ensemble founded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1958. In response to the announcement, Bell said, “I have felt a particular affection for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields ever since I made my very first concerto recording with them under the baton of Marriner when I was just 18 years old. Since then, the orchestra has come to feel like family to me, as we have shared so many cherished moments together.”

“It’s taking on a major responsibility, it’s a bit of a risk,” he said. “But it lets me explore with the institution and the orchestra certain kinds of music which will be challenging, but it’s also something I’ve thought about for some time now, to explore the symphonic repertoire.”

With Bell, it appears that challenges are about knowing when to take them on. “There are some pieces of music that I haven’t done, because I felt I might not do them justice in terms of recording them.”

Recently, Bell and Jeremy Denk record “French Impressions”, with sonatas by Ravel, Saint-Saens, and Franck, marking the two men’s first recital together and allowing Bell to pay tribute to his mentor Josef Gingold with a recording of Cesar Frank’s “Violin Sonata.”

Bell has been in the heat of the public eye since he was 14, he’s one of those performers who packs a lot of charisma, with a riveting performing style and his oft-mentioned good looks. Truth be told, he doesn’t really think that how he looks matters, even though the classical music business, like many things in our modern times, likes to market musicians who look good on an CD cover. “I personally don’t think that’s important at all,” he said, “You’ve got to remember the great Fritz Kreisler was a very handsome man, women loved him, I’m told, but this is about marketing. It has nothing to do with music or your place in the world.”

Jeff Malet • October 31, 2012

Let’s do the Time Warp again. “The Rocky Horror Show” is here just in time for the Halloween season in a fresh production from the Washington Savoyards. This is the live pop musical version that inspired the cult film hit, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. The musical by Richard O’Brien tells the story of a newly engaged couple who get caught in a storm and are forced to seek shelter in the castle of a mad transvestive scientist and his new creation, a muscle man named Rocky. Like the movie, playgoers are encouraged to shout out their favorite one-liners during the performance.

Performances of “The Rocky Horror Show” run through Nov. 4 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St., NE, in the revitalized Atlas District, just north of Capitol Hill. Visit www.savoyards.org to learn more about the show and to buy tickets.

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Nico Dodd • October 20, 2012

“We own The Hamilton,” said R&B legend Mavis Staples. “We were the first to stand on this stage.”

Indeed, last January, Mavis Staples and her band opened The Hamilton as the first performers at the then brand-new supper-club. Wednesday night, the audience settled in with dinner and music by Lea, a soulful singer-songwriter from D.C. As an indication of her performance, she had sold out of her CDs by the end of the night.

Staples’ band exuded cool when they made their entrance on stage and would continue to support Staples throughout the night. The Hamilton’s great sound let their musicianship show.

After their first song, an a cappella gospel tune, Staples informed the audience that one of her back up singers was bed ridden, and that she herself was not feeling at her best. She pointed to her throat and referred to it as her “cold voice.” Despite feeling under the weather, Staples powered through the show. Her skills as a performer and entertainer were amazing.

One especially exciting number was Staples performance of The Band’s “The Weight,” this rendition with Staples singing lead. Staples offered her respects to The Band’s Levon Helms, who died earlier this year.

“Levon,” said Staples, “had to leave us, but he is in a better place.”

Another great number was the title track of You Are Not Alone, her Grammy-winning album with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.

Before her encore, Staples’ band played two instrumental numbers. One was an excellent rendition of the spiritual “Go Down Moses.” Staples’ performance exhibited a clear Gospel influence. Three-part harmonies and extended interludes were built into every song. Staples often interjected political statements into her songs, and said that people were “mixing up the Kool Aid and passing it off as tea,” referring to the Tea Party.

Near the end of the show, Staples chided her sick band mate “She’s probably feeling better, now that she knows that we are working, and she is not.”

Staples encore, “I’ll Take You There” brought the audience to their feet. Staples gave her regards before she left the stage.

“We’ve been taking you there for 62 years, and we aren’t finished yet.”

Nico Dodd • October 11, 2012

British singer-songwriter Donovan appeared at the Hamilton this Saturday, Oct. 6. The “Sunshine Superman” took the packed house on a trip down memory lane, recounting how the Carter family taught him clawhammer picking and how he joined the Beatles on their life-changing trip to India.

Donovan will be performing next Sunday, Oct. 14, at This Land is Your Land, A Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration Concert at the Kennedy Center. The concert, in collaboration with the Grammy Museum, will celebrate the life and work of folk singer and icon Woody Guthrie with performances by John Mellencamp and many others.
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Gary Tischler • October 4, 2012

It was a Saturday night in Washington D.C., urban living night and day, street festivals, parades, the Nationals, the Redskins, concerts and plays and symphonies and singers, and restaurants galore, the weather being fallish, all sorts of things to do everywhere.

Some things go unnoticed, too, unheralded. At the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, a group of people had gathered Sept. 22 to listen, to remember and honor another place, another time, in song and music in commemoration of the Lithuanian Holocaust Memorial Day.

At the start of the Jewish Days of Atonement, before their eyes, another city, a ghetto from a harrowing time of tragedy and loss, rose up, demanding that attention must be paid, that some things can never be forgotten and that the dead can be honored even now, when memories start to fade.

That was the lingering impression during the course of an evening when baritone Jerome Barry, the founder and director of the Embassy Series in Washington, accompanied by pianist Edvinas Minkstimas, with clear and deep emotion, and strong-voiced and passionate, gave voice to the long-ago Jewish residents of the Vilna Ghetto, with their music, their songs, their memories, almost all of them rounded up, oppressed, systematically shot and eventually transported to the death camps of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Ambassador of Lithuania to the United States Zygimantas Pavilionis noted that in remembering the Liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, both the victims of this tragedy of the Holocaust and the whole nation of Lithuania were profoundly affected. “The pain of the Holocaust is also the pain of Lithuania because we lost Lithuanian Jews with whom we had lived together for centuries and suffered together the occupiers of our land,” Pavilionis said.

Barry sang a powerful array of songs, some of them written during the time of the ghetto by the persons who lived and died there and others by survivors as well as songs and music that are intrinsic parts of Jewish cultural and spiritual life. Taken together, the songs re-created what was the emotional, the fear-filled, the still life-filled environment of the ghetto, in which eventually families disappeared daily, in which hundreds of individuals were rounded up regularly and shot, in which people took solace in song and music.

Barry, in moving from song to song, beginning with “Geto” which was written in the Vilna Ghetto by Kasriel Broyde, who continued to direct theatre revues and concerts, to a Jewish prayer expressing longing for the Holy Temple of Jerusalem, brought different skills and feelings to bear on each song. The tone gave us the beating hearts and the pain of the Vilna Jews, suffering under a cloud of daily losses and doom.

For Barry, it seemed that the songs—let’s say the song by the poet Abraham Sutskever, or a song by a young boy who won a composition competition in the ghetto, and the impassioned “Partizaner Lid,” which became an anthem for the underground resistance movement—inspired the best that he had to offer, with all of his gifts on display. He managed to make what was clearly personal for him, personal for everyone there, thus raising an occasion that in the hectic scheme of urban activity to the level of an important occasion both intimate and universal. The songs made you confront the lives of those that perished in terrible times.

By his performance, Barry enriched the material and gave the music the level of emotional authenticity and in the end, punctuated an evening that was more than just another Saturday night.

(Nearly 200,000 Lithuanian Jews died during the Holocaust.)

Gary Tischler • October 1, 2012

The Washington Post described Pat McGee this way: “looks like Brad Pitt, sings like James Taylor, sweats and struts like Springsteen. You can’t deny McGee’s charisma.”

Well, I’m gonna have to wait and see on that. But I did talk to McGee, a homegrown, in-50-different-ways guy, on the phone. He sounded to me like a guy you could sit with at a diner here, or where he lives in Rhode Island, or where he came from—Alexandria—or somewhere on the road, where he is often, performing as the Pat McGee Band with its brand of semi-country-rock-hard-driving-sound rock.

McGee will be here performing Friday, Sept. 28 (and opening the 2012 season) at the Music Center at Strathmore, something he’s been looking forwards to for a long while. (The Pat McGee Band concert will be preceded by a first-time ever tailgate party at 5:30 p.m. The concert is at 8 p.m.)

“Oh, man, yeah, I’ve been wanting to play here, because you hear about the acoustics here all the time,” McGee said. “Plus, it’s sort of a homecoming, like every time I play in the area, we play at Wolf Trap and the Barns and I’m from Alexandria. So, I think people are pretty familiar with us.”

Still, listening to McGee, who is 39 now, you hear a man with some life experience under his belt, a thoughtful guy who’s watched how the music business itself, and the world of performing has changed. “Oh sure, we all thought about being rock stars, you know playing the music the road, lots of fans,” he said. “And we’ve done that to some extent. But things change, you grow up a little. Plus, just the way music is sold and delivered—on the Internet, iTunes and on phones, downloading and everything, makes everything different. You have to keep up with that.”

McGee formed the band in the 1990s, and got it going good when the band was signed by Warner Brothers, from which emerged the album, “Shine,” in 2000 with such hit singles as “Rebecca” and “Runaway.” Another album, “Save Me,” followed in 2004 . There have been nine albums altogether, including the latest, “No Wrong Way to Make It Right,” a bitter-sweet album full of songs about youthful memories, relationships, the future, and full of guitar-driven rhythms.

There’s still a lot of youth in his songs and voice—and in photos and videos, he can play the part of a rocker, but a rocker who knows whereof he sings. He thinks about music—all kinds of music, a lot. To McGee, things have been about change, about moving forward, and still playing the music strong

“To me, performance is the most important part of music. It’s what I think we should respect the most,” he says. “I love performing on the road with other musicians.”

In that case, the Strathmore gig should be a hoot—he’s brought together a lot of people for the ride. “This is going to be like a reunion show, you know,” he said. There’ll be current and former Pat McGee Band members like John Small, Michael Ghegan, Patrick McAloon and Ira Gitlin. And there’s Eddie Hartness, the lead singer of Eddie from Ohio, and Nate Brown from Everything and John “Red” Redling from New Potato Caboose. He’s also invited former high school student musicians from his alma mater Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, Va.

That’s right. McGee is a local boy in more ways than one.

Not only is he an O’Connell grad, an Alexandria native, he started out like a lot of would-be rockers, with a band playing in the Richmond area, but later, also up here in Georgetown. “We played in a place called Dylan’s Café . . . [near] where Café Milano is, in that courtyard. And then we played the Bayou. And, man, when we did that regularly, that’s when I knew we could make it.”

“No Way to Make It Right” is kind of a reunion effort, too, with old music comrades like Jason Mraz, Emerson Hart, Stephen Kellogg, Keaton Simons and Ryan Newell of Sister Hazel, and working with producer Doug Derryberry who produced the group’s first album. Plus the sound is both fresh and familiar. It’s the sound of folk instruments like acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, dobro, fiddle and bouzouki.

He thinks he’s mellowed, gotten a better bead on the future. He’s writing more and more, and the writing is mature. It has something to say and reacts to the things that happen in life—from “riding in my grandma’s Cadillac when I was a kid” to a song called “Elegy for Amy,” which he wrote early on his career. “See, when we were playing in clubs and bars, there’d always be this group of girls sitting up front, and then I went away for a while and when we came back, I noticed that this one girl named Amy, always a fan, always nice and enthusiastic, wasn’t with them. They told me she had died of a really fast-acting cancer. So, I wrote this song.” Then, there’s the powerful “Come Back Home,” written in 2009 and dedicated to the troops serving in the Middle East.” It was also dedicated to his drummer Christ Williams who died of a heart attack. Williams’s younger brother Blake was killed in Iraq.

McGee now lives in Barrington, R.I., a few blocks from his ex-wife with whom he shares custody of their three daughters, Juliet, 6, Elizabeth, 8, and Anna, 10. Both McGee and his ex have moved on to new marriages.

“I guess I’ve grown up some, being a parent and things that happen will do that,” he said. “I want to do more writing, writing country songs and I’ve been going back and forth to Nashville, trying to make that happen.”

But this Friday, he’s here. It will be, for the Pat McGee Band, like old times, from the beginning, the journey until now.