Posts

November 2: A Sunday Afternoon at the Organ Pavilion That Didn't Go According to Plan but Was Nice Anyway

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I went to an unusual concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The original plan had been to have San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez play with the Navy and Marine Bands, but Raúl got called away to play a concert in Palm Desert and the military bands were unavailable due to the seemingly endless government shutdown. (Donald Trump gave an interview to 60 Minutes last night in which he made it clear that his price for ending the shutdown is total capitulation by the Democratic Party. No surprise there.) So Russ Peck was called in to throw together a program for the U.S. Navy’s “Fleet Week,” and naturally he relied on patriotic material as well as some of the medleys he’d played at his last Organ Pavilion appearance, when he performed on the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” August 25, where he played live behind three Laurel and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sue Palmer Brings Her Infectious Blues/Swing/Jump Sound to the Belly Up Tavers with her Motel Swing Orchestra

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Later last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an entertaining Live at the Belly Up episode featuring local musician Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra: Sue Palmer on a Korg electric keyboard; Liz Ajuzie, lead vocals; April West, trombone and second vocals; Jonny Viau, tenor and baritone saxophones; Steve Wilcox, electric guitar; Pete Harrison, upright acoustic bass (he was previously a bass guitarist and he learned the stand-up bass specifically for this band); and Sharon Shufelt, drums, who also suggested the band’s name. They played 11 songs during the course of the one-hour set, and while I was a bit disappointed that only the opener, Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” was an instrumental, Ajuzie is an excellent blues shouter and a far subtler singer than Kim Wilson of The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who’d played the show two weeks ago. She’s also a Black woman who dyes her...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

"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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more