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Chelsea Chen Delights at Organ Pavilion August 11

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 11) my husband Charles and I attended the sixth of nine concerts in the Summer Organ Festival Monday nights in Balboa Park until September 1, when they plan to close out the season with a Beatles tribute. (So far they’ve done The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and an all-around tribute to women in rock which omitted all too many important women rockers, like Suzi Quatro, Pat Benatar, Chrissie Hynde, and Patti Smith, to concentrate way too much on the band Heart; when , I keep wondering, are they going to do Queen, especially since one of civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez’s best selections is his stunning solo organ transcription of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?) The featured organist last night was Chelsea Chen, whom I feel like we’ve grown up with – which we have. She made her Spreckels Organ debut in 2000 when she was still in high school, and now she’s in her early 40’s a...
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Rockin' Jazz Big Band Lives Up to Its Name at "Twilight in the Park" Concert August 6

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday, August 6) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring a group called the Rockin’ Jazz Big Band, whose name alone was irresistible to me. They turned out to be a full-sized big band with the classic swing-era lineup – four trumpets, three trombones, five saxes, piano, guitar, bass, and drums – playing a mixed repertoire that drew on 1950’s and 1960’s big-band songs along with modern rock and pop tunes done up in swing style. The program opened with Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova,” which he originally wrote in 1962 for one of his big-band albums on Mercury (with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, of all people, as the flute soloist!) but which got recycled by Mike Myers for the Austin Powers movies, which spoofed the James Bond mythos . Then their female singer, Vanessa Costana (I’m guessing at the spelling of the name because the band’s leader, drummer Bill Dutton, bar...
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Soprano Alisa Jordheim Shines in August 4 Concert at Organ Pavilion with Raúl Prieto Ramírez as Her Organ Accompanist

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 14) my husband Charles and I returned to the Monday evening summer organ concerts in Balboa Park after missing last Monday’s with organist Ahreum Han because we were out of town. (At least two of our long-time friends there last night told us it was a great concert.) Last night we had to suffer through the typical egomania of San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who was giving the concert himself as accompanist for a quite accomplished soprano named Alisa Jordheim. Her program was evenly divided between opera arias, Lieder, and selections from the “Great American Songbook” from Broadway and Hollywood in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. The program began with Raúl playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532. After he was done with the piece he made a slighting comment to the effect that he’d crossed off Bach from the list of things he had to ...
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3 Car Garage Play Infectious Rock Covers at the Organ Pavilion July 24

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, July 24), my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring 3 Car Garage (the second group in the season, after 8 Track Highway, whose name begins with a number), a quite entertaining cover band even though when I wrote yesterday’s journal entry I copied the paragraph from their Web site listing the wide variety of acts they covered. Charles read it and wondered how they could put together a credible set list from songs by bands so diverse, but they managed it. We got there early enough to hear their sound check, doing the song “Amie” (pronounced “Amy”) by Pure Prairie League, a band I remember seeing ads for “in the day” but never actually listening to. The actual set began with a song called “How Long” by Ace, followed by Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309 (Jenny)” – an interesting ...
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Stacy Antonel, a.k.a. "Ginger Cowgirl," Plays Hot Concert at Balboa Park's Organ Pavilion July 15

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, July 15) I played hooky from my review responsibilities for Fanfare magazine and attended a “Twilight in the Park” organ concert in Balboa Park featuring Ginger Cowgirl, the stage name for the quite appealing Stacy Antonel. She grew up in San Diego but after she fell in love with country music, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 2017 to try to make it as a big star in country music’s citadel. Alas, she proved to be too small a fish in a big pond, though she has a great voice and a great bod, showcase last night in an all-black outfit featuring a black shirt and skin-tight black pants. Stacy Antonel says on her Web site she discovered country music through the $1 record rack at a local thrift store. On her “Twilight in the Park” set she played an appealing mix of originals and classic country covers, some of the latter from her new three-song EP Stacy Antonel and the Seahorse...
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Richard Hills Shines in Second Balboa Park Monday Night Organ Concert July 14

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 14) my husband Charles and I went to the second concert in the Monday night summer series the Spreckels Organ Society puts on every year in Balboa Park (though there wasn’t one in 2020 and a late-in-the-year one in 2021 due to the COVID-19 lockdowns). The concert was a sheer delight! It was given by British organist Richard Hills, who’s described in his official bio as “one of the very few musicians truly to have bridged and mastered the divide between the world of the classical organ and that of the theatre organ.” Actually, his program at the Spreckels Organ was more heavily weighted towards the theatre organ side, and it opened with a piece that itself bridged the gap. It was an organ transcription of the overture to the 1831 operetta Zampa by French composer Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833). It not only sounded very much like the sort of music used to accompany action sce...
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Joshua Stafford Opens Balboa Park's Monday Night Concerts at Organ Pavilion July 7

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 7) my husband Charles and I went to the first of the nine scheduled Monday night summer organ concerts (two fewer than in most recent years) at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The organist was Joshua Stafford, a nice-looking youngish man who’s the Minister of Music at the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio. He also has a direct connection to the Organ Pavilion since he now holds the Jared Jacobsen chair at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. Jacobsen himself had had that gig from 1996 until his tragic death in a car accident in Ohio in August 2019. Before that he’d been San Diego Civic Organist from 1978 to 1984 and still played the Spreckels Organ occasionally. Stafford got to sit next to Jacobsen at the Chautauqua organ bench and learn from him until Jacobsen’s death left the gig open and Stafford was hired as Jacobsen’s replacement in 2020. Appa...
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