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Lovely Afternoon of Beethoven Chamber Music at St. Paul's October 4

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Saturday, October 4) I got two reviews done for Fanfare magazine, and in between I went to a nice concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring the Rev. Penny Bridges, who in addition to pastoring the church is also a quite good amateur viola player (no viola jokes, please!). She led a concert featuring two chamber works by Beethoven, one little known and one well known. The little-known piece was a duet for viola and cello officially called “Duet mit zwei obligaten Augengläsern,” which means “Duet with two obligatory eyeglasses.” Apparently Beethoven gave that title because the violist and cellist for whom he wrote it were both nearsighted and needed glasses to read the music – which caused the audience at the church to chuckle when both Bridges and her cello partner, Janet White, put on glasses so they could read the music. The piece is usually believed to have been written in t...
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The Fabulous Thunderbirds on "Live at the Belly Up": Great Blues Band, but Could Use a Better Singer

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Friday, October 3 I took advantage of my husband Charles’s relatively late work call (1 to 10 p.m.) to watch the latest installment of Live at the Belly Up on KPBS featuring a blues band called The Fabulous Thunderbirds. They’ve existed since 1974 and came as close as they ever got to the brass ring of stardom in 1986 with a song called “Tuff Enuff” [sic] that was featured in a movie called Gung Ho . Their Wikipedia page tells a rather sad tale of record contracts signed and then canceled as the band’s personnel changed over the years. The original lineup included Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s older brother, on guitar, but last night’s lineup was a simple four-piece: vocal, guitar, electric bass, drums. I’ve often judged Live at the Belly Up episodes by the number of songs the band crowds into their one-hour (less intro, outro and the inevitable interstitial interview segments) time slo...
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"Live at the Belly Up" Presents 1960's Cover Band Back to the Garden

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, September 26) I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode on KPBS which attracted my attention not only because it was a new one featuring a band I hadn’t heard of, but the band was a group called Back to the Garden that does covers of 1960’s rock songs. It seemed odd that Live at the Belly Up was presenting a cover band, though the band’s Web site is rather defensive about their status. Their Facebook page insists, “This is not a ‘tribute band’ impersonating the looks/costumes of famous musicians. Instead, Back To The Garden puts their focus entirely on the music.” They also insist that they’re not just presenting the music but incorporating it as part of a “theatrical experience.” As such, one of their band members is a self-proclaimed “storyteller” named Robert John Hughes who delivers historical lectures between some of the songs to offer the context in which they were first ...
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Sopranos Daitong Li and Ingrid Stromberg Give Free Recital September 13 at St. Paul's Cathedral

Concert Was Lovely Except for Barbara Strozzi’s Interminable Cantata by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved LYesterday afternoon (Saturday, September 13) I went to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for a free vocal concert featuring sopranos Daitong Li and Ingrid Stromberg, which was scheduled for the church’s “Great Hall” (actually a second-story room off the main chapel) and was supposed to run from 4 to 5 p.m. It actually started around 4:10 and ended at 5:15, though there was a mid-concert intermission (unusual in these presentations). Li and Stromberg met in 2024 when they were both studying voice at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). They both have professional careers outside music, Li as a data scientist in financial services and Stromberg as a campus planner. Li grew up playing the erhu, a two-stringed version of a violin which George Gershwin rather cattily remarked always sounded out of tune. Their accompanist w...
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The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards: Too Much Production, Too Many Medleys

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, September 7) I watched the live telecast of the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. They didn’t announce it as the “ … Annual” but the awards show began in 1984, which would have made last night’s the 42nd (assuming the shows continued every year). It was the typical lumbering beast of a modern awards show, in which the performances by various nominated artists were more important than the rather perfunctory presentations of the actual awards. My B.S. Detector went off big-time when I heard the announcer hyping the contents of the upcoming show and say they were honoring the “genius” of rapper Busta Rhymes. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand rap and I think it’s a contradiction in terms to call any rapper a “genius.” As I’ve said before, rock ‘n’ roll evolved in its first 20 years from the simplicity of early Elvis and the Black artists he was imitating to the sophistication of works like Th...
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Raúl Prieto Ramírez and "Organism" Join Forces for a Beatles Tribute Concert September 1 to Wrap Up the 2025 Summer Organ Festival

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, September 1) my husband Charles and I went to the last concert in this year’s Summer Organ Festival Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. As usual these days, the season closed with a rock tribute, and this year they chose The Beatles in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Fab Four’s one San Diego concert in the long-gone Balboa Stadium on the San Diego High School campus on August 28, 1965. (A smaller, more practicable Balboa Stadium has since replaced it.) There’s an interesting online article by Chuck Gunderson at https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/v55-1/pdf/v55-1gunderson.pdf about The Beatles’ San Diego concert, which among other things explains why the San Diego show was the only Beatles’ concert during their 1965 U.S. tour that did not sell out. It was a last-minute add-on to their schedule and also there was a feud between San Diego’s two bi...
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Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas Play Last Concert of the "Twilight in the Park" Season August 28

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Thursday, August 28 I went to the last “Twilight in the Park” concert of the 2025 series to see and hear a band called the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas. At least that’s their name for themselves; for some reason the organizers of Twilight in the Park thought that was obscene and demanded that the band rename itself Back Pocket Whiskey Fellas, even though drummer Ric Lee’s bass drum contained not only the band’s true name but a logo featuring a drawing of a woman’s tightly clad blue-jeaned ass with a whiskey flask stuck in her back pocket. The band members themselves stumbled over the name at times, as if they had a hard time remembering the censored version they were supposed to use instead of their real one. I hadn’t been sure I wanted to go – the last time I’d seen them I’d been put off by the sexism of their logo, and also there was another event last night (a reception at the OBR gallery, or w...
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