There will be dos guitarras in concert Friday in Tillett Gardens and Saturday at the St. John School of the Arts, but, with one exception, they will be playing separately.
The short explanation is that the program both nights will consist of music by Jorge Morel on guitar, Michèle Ramo on guitar and violin, and Heidi Hepler on vocals. Morel is a solo artist. Ramo and Hepler perform as a duo – Ramo & Heidi – she as vocalist, he on guitar.
However, for their Virgin Islands tour, Ramo will also play the violin for collaborations with Morel, and for just one piece, they will play a guitar duet.
Although the artists have known each other for some time, this will be their first time performing together. It will be Ramo and Hepler's first visit to the islands. Morel recalls that he played once many years ago on St. John, but he has never performed on St. Thomas, although he visited the island several times while living in Puerto Rico in the 1960s.
Today, they all live in the same apartment building in the Forest Hills section of New York's Queens borough. The idea of touring together, Hepler says, came from a mutual friend, Art D'Lugoff, who owned the old Village Gate, a club that in its heyday attracted the top names in jazz. After Morel moved to New York in the 1960s, he performed there regularly, sharing the bill with such legends as Errol Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton and Herbie Mann.
Last year, "Art came to hear us perform," Hepler says of Ramo & Heidi. "And he introduced us to Rhoda Tillett and ‘Sis' Frank when they were up in New York."
Tillett is the producer of the Arts Alive concerts in Tillett Gardens, and Frank is the director of the St. John School of the Arts.
Everybody liked everybody, and the rest is about to become history this weekend.
Argentinian performer/composer Morel will open the program, playing mainly South American music, including several of his own compositions and his arrangements of some Gershwin melodies and a suite from "West Side Story." Toward the end of the first half, Ramo will join him for the guitar duet, "Two to Tango."
"This will be the premiere of that piece, something I wrote recently," Morel says.
Another solo by Morel, "Danza" by Pablo Escobar, his teacher in Argentina, will close the first half of the progarm. "In the piece, the guitar resembles the harp," Morel says. "I have to retune the guitar for it, so I'm doing it just before the intermission."
For the second half of the program, Ramo & Heidi will be in the spotlight, performing "Brazilian and jazz-influence" music, Hepler says. At the end, Morel will join them for an arrangement of "Granada," with Ramo switching to violin.
Friday's concert in Tillett Gardens is being promoted as "Cabaret in the Gardens," with seating at tables throughout the arts complex, rather than in theater-style rows. Morel says, however, "Don't bill us as a cabaret act. Heidi and Michele are concert artists. My music is a fusing of the classical technique of the guitar with arrangements of music within the classical training of the instrument."
Indeed, through his compositions and his arrangements, Morel has added substantially to the repertoire for solo guitar, all the while challenging traditional, technical and stylistic "limits" of the instrument.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1931, he began studying the guitar at the age of 7. After graduating from the music academy of Pablo Escobar, he joined Escobar in radio and live concerts. He went Ecuador and Colombia to perform, then to Cuba, where he recorded his first solo album. Performances that followed in Puerto Rico led to engagements in California and Hawaii and, eventually, his Carnegie Hall debut in 1961.
"I went to Cuba about two months after Castro came to power," Morel recalls, "but I had been booked there a year a before. With the revolution, I said, ‘Well, that contract is not going to be in effect any more.' But they called me and said, ‘We still want you to come. This has nothing to do with you or the people who manage you.'"
It was in the United States, however, that he found commercial success. While playing at the Village Gate, he became friends with Chet Atkins, who helped him get a recording contract with RCA Victor.
Renowned as a composer as well a performer, Morel has 14 volumes of music published under the title "Virtuoso South American Guitar Music." He also has a "master class" video in which he performs and analyzes some of his own compositions as well as music by Gershwin and demonstrates his special guitar tuning to achieve a harp-like sound. He performed his "Suite del Sur" (Southern Suite) concerto for guitar and orchestra with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Zubin Mehta. He has his own web site at www.jorgemorel.com.
The New York Times has hailed him as "an extraordinarily suave guitarist" who "applies a broad range of color and dynamics and scampers up and down the fingerboard with dazzling assurance."
Violinist/guitarist Michele Ramo was born in Italy and moved to the United States to pursue his work as a composer and jazz instrumentalist. Heidi Hepler, who captured the Miss Michigan crown in 1980 with an operetta music rendition as her talent, was classically trained as a singer, actress and lyricist. Although she lived and worked for a time in Rome, the two met in Detroit, where they were performing in jazz clubs, in 1994. Later that year they were married, and five years later, they moved to New York.
From Morel the two have won plaudits for a "delightful combination of a great voice… able to sing anything she wants, and guitar playing of excellent quality, technique and musicality."
"We compose together," Hepler says of herself and her husband, incorporating strong "Brazilian and jazz influence." While the two have not been to the Virgin Islands before, "in the summer we do open-air concerts in Sicily," she says, "so we're looking forward to it."
Concert information
Friday's concert at Tillett Gardens on St. Thomas begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. Seating will be cabaret style and reserved. Polli's Mexican Restaurant in the complex will provide bar service all evening, dinner menu service at restaurant tables until 10 p.m., and light fare in the garden "until." Tickets are available in advance at the Tillett Gallery. For reservations, strongly recommended because of limited seating, call 775-1929, fax to 775-9482 or e-mail to tillett@islands.vi.
Saturday's concert at the St. John School of the Arts in Cruz Bay, St. John, begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 general admission, $25 for students with I.D. They're being sold in advance at Connections. As seating is limited, advance purchase is recommended. For additional information, call 779-4322 or 776-6777.
