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George Herms

George Herms is a Los Angeles assemblage artist who was associated with the Beats and who, my colleague Christopher Knight noted in a review of a 2005 Herms retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, has discovered the “precise location for making spiritually inclined art out of worldly trash.”

Herms may also be the ultimate outsider artist, even though he is insider enough that when the Whitney Museum of Art had a show on Beat culture in 1996, several of his works were included and he was invited on the Charlie Rose show along with Allen Ginsberg. He was, of necessity, part of the big Los Angeles show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006. The Getty Research Institute has been busily cataloging hundreds of boxes of his work from a 50-year career. His name has been mentioned in the Los Angeles Times 184 times in the last 25 years.

Still, he has no Wikipedia entry. And while the prices for the work of many of his fashionable colleagues, such as Wallace Berman, have been on a rising curve for quite some time, Herms has been so overlooked that he was reportedly living out of his car a few years ago.

But Herms is now an opera, and how many living artists can say that about themselves? “George Herms: The Artist’s Life,” conceived of by Herms and performed by him with the help of two terrific jazz bands and a vocalist, had the first of three performances at REDCAT Thursday. It is not to be missed.

Opera is an open word, and this is being described as a free-jazz opera, jazz having been the music the Beats chose for their soundtrack. There were two superb jazz ensembles, the heady eight-member Bobby Bradford Mo’tet and the vital Theo Saunders Group, a sextet -- one band for each side of the stage.

This is also an assemblage opera, a stream-of-consciousness opera, a performance-art opera, an art opera, an anti-opera, an amateur opera and, although Herms didn’t appear to want to admit it, a pro opera. And Herms had to have been gratified that it was also a well-attended opera; he hasn’t completely fallen off the map.

In fact, Thursday's crowd, which included a number of what appeared to be aging Beats, was part of the fun. The marijuana smoke on the Disney parking lot third level was thick enough that many ticketholders were probably high by the time they entered. The box office had to disabuse some that a free-jazz opera is not a free jazz-opera; you had to pay.

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Jazz Opera Workshop by Artist George Herms

Jazz Opera Workshop by Artist George Herms

Source: All About Jazz

"Opera Workshop" Art Installation and Free Jazz Opera Workshop brought to you by Phantom Galleries LA

Takes place at 269 N Beverly Dr, Beverly Hills 90012

Please join us for live jazz music on August 18 or August 25, 2007. Rehearsals on the 13, 14, 17. “Opera Workshop" is the umbrella title of two blended, process-based installations that set out to develop ideas and create a zone of play, flexibility, and collaboration in the heart of a busy ...

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