Hooked on body percussion

One thing I love about C-U: All the free events featuring fantastic talent. Like Crosspulse Duo Keith Terry and Evie Ladin, who performed in the Krannert Center lobby March 14. The body percussionists (she plays banjo too) performed what Rocky Maffit called an amalgam of composition and choreography. During their engaging performance, Terry mentioned the International Body Music Festival July 3-12 in Bali, Indonesia. He founded it in 2008. After watching him and Ladin, I want to do body percussion too and go to this festival!

'Basetrack Live' was intense

Not many people showed up for "Basetrack Live" Wednesday night at Krannert Center. Too bad. The multimedia show about U.S. veterans of the Afghanistan war and their spouses was quite effective in giving you a sense of what war was like for Marines and their spouses. It featured video interviews, photographs, a four-piece live band that played hard-driving new music and two actors, one a Marine veteran, who came across as real people as they spoke words taken verbatim from interviews with real Marines and their wives. Intense.

Entertaining organist

Cameron Carpenter broke the fourth and other walls Thursday night at Krannert Center, talking to the audience about his International Touring Organ, a huge digital organ that replicates the pipe organ, and the music he played from Henry Mancini to Bach to Gershwin to lesser knowns like Scriabin and Dupre. Someone ought to create a phantasmagorical Broadway show or movie around the theatrical Carpenter, who wears a faux-hawk and designer clothes. He could pull it off.