Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 66

Chicago Tribune, Monday, July 2, 1984 Section 4 5 Tempo 'Cannonball' not even a race, let alone a movie "Cannonball Run II" No stars Mint-review: Worthies Directed bv Hal Neodtient; written by m.eaummi i jiu ji .1 1 Si Ruddy and Harvey Millar; mualc by Al Cappa; producad by Albert S. Ruddy; Warner Brae. releeae al trie Lake Shore and Puttying tn Rated PQ. THE CAST J. McClure Burt ReynoMa Victor DomOeLuiee Blake Dean Mertm Fenderbaum Sammy Devta Jr.

She Jamie Ferr Veronica Shirley MacLataie Betty MerUu Henner tees that he is giving a performance. In "Cannonball Run he appears on the location, says his gag lines, smiles, does a stunt or two and then leaves. There is no performance. He tries harder when he does a guest shot on the "Tonight" show. But he's not playing a character, you say? He's just piaying Burt Reynolds? That's not what the credits say.

And, by comparison, John Wayne, who was to a horse what. Reynolds would like to think he is to a car, never failed to perform in even his flimsiest three-reeler Western. Reynolds reportedly is in the hospital for a minor ailment. While i he's recuperating, he ought to think seriously about his film career. With pictures like "Cannon-ball Run II, he is quickly using up the good will that celebrity By Gene Siskel Movie critic PID YOU HAVE A nice weekend? That's nice.

Then you didn't see "Cannonball Run II," which is even more horrible than "The Cannon-ball Run" and "Stroker Ace" and "Smokey and the Bandit III" and "Smokey and the Bandit II," all of which, of course, also featured Burt Reynolds as a good old boy putting the pedal to the metal. How could any car race movie be worse than "Stroker Easy, and how's this for The cross-country road race in "Cannonball Run II" takes place mostly off camera in a pedestrian animation sequence by Ralph Bak-shi. We see a bunch of little cars with lines and arrows slide across a national map to the beat of some unforgettable music. And that's the race. How cheap can you get? How "Cannonball Run II" doesn't even try to be a movie.

It's snapshots of a bunch of familiar, tired old faces improvising tired old gags. The story hah involves another transcontinental road race sponsored this time by an oil-rich sheik Jamie Farr who hopes to win his own $1 million prize. AMONG THE DRIVERS who don't drive very much are Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. Also along for the non-ride are Shirley MacLaine and Marilu Henner playing actresses dressed as nuns and delivering a string of tasteless nun jokes. Another low point is when a ghostlike Charles Nelson Reilly be- fins complimenting Sammy Davis r.

on his jewelry. But there wouldn't be a "Cannonball Run without the cooperation of Burt Reynolds, who apparently has a death wish regarding his fans. Reynolds' name on a film no longer guaran little regard for the audience can yeu have? All of the road racing appears to have been done in southern California so as not to interfere with the tennis and golf games of its celebrity-filled cast. A cameo appearance by Frank Sinatra appears to have been filmed in isolation and then inserted so as to appear that Reynolds is in the same scene with him. Dom De Luise left and Burt Reynolds team up for a top-secret job in "Cannonball Run II." Leon Fleisher delivers sensitive playing after long absence By Howard Reich 0t has been 11 years since the gifted pianist Leon Fleisher has played in the Chicago area, and his return to Ravinia Saturday night reminded one of just how persuasive an artist he can be.

Not that Fleisher's performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of James Levine, was flawless or always at the peak of his capabilities. It's just that, at his best, Fleisher showed the sublime control of the instrument that has distinguished his playing since the dynamic beginnings of his career. A great deal has happened to Fleisher since those early days of the late '50s and early '60s, when he set new standards with recordings such as his insightful Beethoven concerto cycle with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. In the mid-'60s Fleisher lost the use of his right hand at the keyboard due to an unexplained, painful muscular-neurological disorder. The young virtuoso withdrew from the con passages, he plays deeply into the keyboard, producing a timbre far richer and more evocative than one usually hears from the current crop of international pianists.

Fleisher played the Ravel very much in the French manner, with each passage of this one-movement work reflecting a different color in the prism. The stormy opening cadenza had a tremendous fury of sound, the jazz-tinged mid-section was visceral in its quick staccato punctuation and the grandly arpeggiated closing cadenza represented a most sensual approach to Impressionism. STILL, THERE WAS a nervous edge to this performance that prevented one from hearing all that Fleisher can do. Clarity and some accuracy were sacrificed in the opening passages, and the pianist was too hurried to let the audience savor the colors and textures of the concluding pages. In all, though, Fleisher showed that even after all these years and all the setbacks, his remarkable gifts as a musician still flourish.

Let's hope it will be a shorter wait till the next time we hear him. The rest of the concert only partially lived up to Fleisher's high musical standard, and this was in Levine reading of three selections from Schubert's incidental music to "Rosamunde" which Levine and the CSO will record for Deutsche Grammophon Monday and Tuesday in Orchestra Hall. The performance of the Overture, Entr'acte No. 3 and Ballet No. 2 was a bit studied and precious, but nevertheless Levine coaxed exquisite lyricism from the orchestra.

Far less interesting was Levine's treatment of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony No. 6 which Levine and the CSO will record for RCA July 11 in Orchestra Hall. The players were pushed to perversely fast tempos and bizarre volume peaks, which generally diminished this deeply lyrical work to the status of a mere showpiece. If the recordings duplicate the Ravinia performances, the disks will represent opposite ends of the CSO's art. cert stage, then gradually returned with a lesser career as a conductor and performer of the limited repertoire of piano works written for the left hand alone.

IT WAS IN this genre that Fleisher returned to Ravinia, playing the best of the lot, Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand which Fleisher performed at Ravinia in 1968 and 1973, Fleisher's repeat of this music comes as something of a surprise, because in 1982 he made concert history of a sort with a performance in Baltimore of Franck's Symphonic Variations, his right hand functioning well. Why Fleisher has since held back from a full-fledged return to the standard repertoire has never been fully explained, but his musicianship and sensitivity in the Ravel makes one yearn for the day he does. Above all else, Fleisher astounds the ear with the beauty, variety and control of his tone. At soft dynamic levels, he can produce a delicate sound that nevertheless cuts through the orchestral texture. In large-scale I At I' 1 1 1 Leon Fleisher: Astounding the ear with the beauty of his tone.

Heavy Manners hits end of the road Musical ambassador performs in 2 worlds off attorney fees and stuff we owed from the Tosh sessions. It cost us over $15,000. Some of the people we work with thought it would be a good idea to nave Tosh involved, but it didn't turn out that way." Fagan, who has worked as a solo artist in the past, plans to "stand back and take a look around" before getting on with her musical career. "I'm going to keen foing until I make it," she says, "but I don't have any efinite plans. My husband is looking for a job now in Los Angeles, but we'll probably end up staying in Chicago.

I do know that I won be putting together another Chicago bar band." LUSTIG, WHO currently works part time at a record store, is looking for a full-time job in communications, public relations or promotion. I'd like to stay in the music business," he says, "but not as a performer." As for the other Manners members, "Kevin Smith is doing well scoring commercials, and he'll keep on doing that," says Fagan. "Jimmy Robinson plans to stay in music, and Mitch Kohlhagen has always had another fob as an insurance inspector. And Ira Levin, who replaced longtime sax player Frankie Hill when Hill left to found Metropol earlier this year is about to get his doctorate in psychology. "You know, you want to keep going forward, but we just didn't feel like getting it together one more time to make one more presentation to a major record label," Fagan adds.

"Part of our problem, I think, was that the people involved with the band, like our management and attorneys and accountants, just didn't have the national and international connections we needed. We didn't want to keep on playing clubs, and it was getting harder and harder to stick to our standards; so we decided it was better to go ahead and break up now." Heavy Manners fans have five more chances to see the group before they disband. In addition to the July 19 date at Park West, they'll be at Tuts on Friday and at Biddy Mulligan's on Saturday, then move to the suburbs for shows July 13 at FitzGerald's in Berwyn and concerts July 14 at McGreevy's in Glenview. By Lynn Van Matre Pop music critic FOR THE LAST few years, reggaepop band Heavy Manners has ranked as one of the heavy hitters on the Chicago-area club circuit. The group's engaging, danceable sound has brought them a following in both city and suburbs, and their relatively frequent all-ages shows have helped endear them to teenage audiences.

But wider recognition and a maior label record deal has eluded them, and now, after four years of struggle, Heavy Manners is calling it quits. The band's July 19 appearance at Park West will be their last, says drummer Shel Lustig. "Basically, we're just frustrated," he explains. "My friends can believe we're breaking up, but we can't go on playing clubs all our lives. The Chicago club circuit is going down the tubes, anyway.

Some of the good clubs closed: some of the ones that are left are poorly run. And video has really hurt the live scene. "The major record companies are aware of us. We've sent them our records, and they keep telling us they would like to hear more. But we think if a label really believed in us, they would have taken us under their wing by now.

LAST FALL, in an attempt to raise their profile and credibility with major labels, the band hired well-known Jamaican reggae artist Peter Tosh to produce four songs for them. The decision, according to Heavy Manners vocalistsongwriter Kate Fagan, turned out to be a very expensive mistake, for which the band is still paying. "We hoped Tosh would present us to his label, but he didn't," says Fagan. "In fact, he didn't really follow through on the project. He kind of disappeared, and we ended up putting out our last single ''Say It" ourselves.

"We knew that 'Say It' would be our last project," she adds. "We've been staying together this long to pay By Larry Kart Self-appointed ambassador to many musical cultures and a podium snake-oil salesman to rival Leonard Bernstein, composer-conductor David Amram came to Grant Park Saturday and Sunday nights to lead the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra in a concert that paid tribute to, as Amram put it more than a few times, "our beautiful roots." The first half of the program was dubbed "Old World Roots' the second "From the New World," the latter deserving first discussion because it included the world remiere of "Reflections," a work trombonist-composer Slide Hampton in which Hampton was the featured soloist. Born in Jeannette, in 1932, Hampton grew up in Indianapolis, which is fitting because that city is the home of Hampton's major influence, J.J. Johnson, the premier trombonist in modern jazz and a composer whose works for orchestra "Perceptions," "Poem for Brass" must have inspired Hampton's effort. "Reflections" shares with Johnson's compositions a marvelous flair for brass sonorities, along with a fondness for neo-Bartokian string writing.

The four-movement, 20-minute work began with mis-terioso string textures, followed by four separate solo turns from Hampton. THREE OF THOSE passages were muted, with a different mute being used each time, and the various tone colors Hampton obtained were exquisite ranging from a hauntingly melancholic cry to a sly, witty hoarseness. Jazz had yet to arrive at this point, but that music was in the air; and when bass, drums and piano cut in, Hampton soared on to a swinging solo climax. Somewhat episodic, "Reflections" lacked the formal coherence that its best moments promised that Bar-tokian opening and a subtly scored passage for Hampton and winds seemed to cry out for further development. Overall, though, "Reflections" was a handsome fusion of jazz and classical techniques and a splendid showcase for the composer-soloist's virtuosity.

Attractive, too, was Amram's "fusion" piece, "In Memory of Chano Pozo," a tribute to the great Cuban percussionist who played with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra in the late 1940s. Brightly scored and full of rhythmic life, it ended the concert with considerable gusto. David Amram Earlier on, however, Amram's control of the orchestra often seemed to be in doubt, particularly in the "Old World Roots" part of the program. ROSSINI'S "BARBER of Seville" overture and Wagner's Festmarch from "Tannhaiiser" were scrappily played, with things settling down for selections from Chopin's "Les Sylphides" and the "Hungarian March" from Berlioz' "The Damnation of Faust." Throughout the evening, the work of the orchestra's principal oboist, Gladys Elliot, was impressive. uuuuuuu dug ciu jjjj uoaouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu a 4TrrarBlB.

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