Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s organ concert at Balboa Park featured Isabelle Demers, a French-Canadian performer who now lives in the U.S. and teaches at Baylor University in Texas. Demers has been here several times before — the first time she was selling her CD The Old and the New , though last night she didn’t have a merch table — and though her performance may not have been quite as overwhelming as Thomas Ospital’s the week before, it was a wide-ranging concert that offered a lot of colors and unusual organ sounds. She began with one of a number of virtual collaborations between two Baroque masters, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Bach’s adaptation for organ solo of a Vivaldi concerto for two violins and orchestra, RV 522, which in Bach’s version bears the identifying number BWV 593. (The initials stand for “Bach Werke Verlag,” the last word simply being the German for “publis...

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved I first heard of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival about a month before it happened, when I was hanging out at an alternative radical office in San Francisco and seeing newspapers from the underground press of 1969. Along with the usual political and cultural articles, and ads promoting “head shops” and other businesses of political appeal to the hippie and radical communities, was an engaging listing of quite a few major rock and folk-music acts scheduled to perform at a three-day series of concerts. I briefly was tempted to go, until I realized that as a kid just about to turn 16 in a city on the opposite end of the country from where it was supposed to take place, there was no practical way for me to get there or to survive alone that far from home. A lot of people did make that journey, though, and I saw quite a few of them on film in a documentary PBS-TV ...

I have long been an admirer of the pioneering and tragically short-lived 1920's jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903-August 6, 1931), born and raised in Davenport, Iowa and the first white jazz musician who played with the power, brilliance and overall excellence of the finest African-American jazz performers. So I was recently relieved to see a post on the Bix Beiderbecke online forum,  https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/bixography/ , that the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Museum, which opened in Davenport in 2017, came through the recent Mississippi River floods with its irreplaceable collection of Bix memorabilia is unscathed.  First, a bit of Bix on record courtesy of YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ue9igC7flI The song is J. Russel Robinson's “Singin’ the Blues,” recorded February 4, 1927 by Frank Trumbauer and His Orchestra. The soloists are Trumbauer on C-melody saxophone (a no-longer-used instrument pitched midway between an alto and tenor sax), Bi...