Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved August 29 was the “Silent Movie Night” at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, and my husband Charles and I made it a point of getting there early so we could stake out good seats and be able to see the films effectively without too many people in our way. We were also worried that the Spreckels Organ Society had announced that they were blocking off the primo seats for people attending the beer and wine tasting event at 5:30 p.m. (Charles said that if I were interested in beer or wine he might have wanted us to go, even at a cost of $60 per person – at least it’s a benefit for the Spreckels Organ Society, a cause we support – but since I don’t drink alcohol and they weren’t serving a full meal, just hors d’oeuvre , there wasn’t much point in me going.) Charles wanted to block off some seats for friends of ours, and though I was a bit anxious about that, the people he had invited all showed up. Like a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s ninth in this year’s series of 11 Monday night concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion featured an ensemble called “Duo MusArt,” which is simply San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez (whose stage personality annoys me no end) and his wife, pianist María Teresa Sierra. The fact that Raúl, who comes off in person like a total screaming queen, is actually married to a woman is perhaps the most surprising thing about this duo. They first played together at the Organ Pavilion in 2018, the first summer season since Raúl was hired as civic organist, and they’ve troed to do it several times since without success. They scheduled it for 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic hit (I’ll never forget the opening months of the lockdown, in which all of Balboa Park was literally sealed off with crime-scene tape. They tried again in 2021 during the late season (September and October instead of July and...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Following the David Bowie concert video PBS showed last Saturday night, my husband Charles and I watched a 2005 documentary on a musical artist who in his own way was even more transgressive than David Bowie: Sun Ra, the pioneer of avant-garde “free” jazz, electronic jazz and what’s been called “Afro-futrurism,” which as far as I can tell means science fiction written by Black people and drawing on themes of Black culture. I just wrote a good deal about Sun Ra in connection with a concert video we’d seen of him Friday night on YouTube, a 1986 video of a performance he gave in, of all places, East Berlin. East Germany in general, and East Berlin in particular, had the reputation of being a dry, desiccated cultural wasteland, so it was startling as all hell to see Sun Ra got an invitation to perform there at a time when the East German regime still looked like it would go on forever, three years befor...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night my husband Charles and I watched a PBS special, alas cut down to fit in those abominable “phedge breaks” by which American public television has to demean itself to beg for money from its viewers instead of having a guaranteed revenue stream from TV set licenses the way the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other public TV networks in civilized countries do. The show was a concert given by David Bowie in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on August 12, 1983 as part of the “Serious Moonlight” tour, a year-long progress throughout the world to promote his first album for EMI, Let’s Dance. EMI had lured him from his long-term home at RCA Victor with a huge contract offer that was then the biggest ever given to a solo artist (though eventually Prince would get a bigger one from Warner Bros. and then Michael Jackson would get a still larger one from CBS-Sony), and for Bowie’s first ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing YouTube post of a concert given by free-jazz musician Sun Ra in a hall in East Berlin in 1986 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYSHhZVh3o ). I had expected this to be a documentary about the curious and fascinating career of this still little-known jazz master whose music really doesn’t sound like anybody else’s, but instead it turned out to be an hour-long concert film originally shown on East German television in 1988, two years after the concert took place and two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual friendly takeover of East Germany by the former West Germany, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Federal Republic of Germany”). As at least one commentator on YouTube pointed out, the existence of this film belies the reputation of East Germany (or, to use its full legal name, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik – “Germa...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night my husband Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the eighth in the series of 11 Monday night concerts, this time featuring a woman organist from New England named Amanda Mole – and yes, her name is pronounced like her rodent namesake. She made the virtually inevitable comment that in her home state of Massachusetts it would be inconceivable to have an outdoor pipe organ at all, let alone one used for Sunday afternoon concerts 52 weeks a year. Mole played a hard-core classical program that heavily referenced Johann Sebastian Bach even though she played nothing actually by Bach until her encore (more on that later). She opened with a transcription by 19th century British organist William Thomas Best of the overture to Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul – or Paulus , as it’s known when it’s performed in the original German. (The Church of England authorities who com...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved My husband Charles and I came home after the organ concert in Balboa Park and eveutually we watched a movie together, the 1947 film Carnegie Hall. It was produced by Boris Morros – the former musical director for Paramount, who at the time he made this film was also ostensible owner of the American Recording Associates (ARA), a short-lived label that according to Morros’s own account later on was actually secretly funded by the Communist Party, U.S.A. (nd when he reported this to the FBI, they told Morros to stay involved with the Soviet-backed party and report to them) and former RKO studio head William LeBaron. Carnegie Hall was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer – and at nearly 2 ½ hours it’s twice as long as most of the vest-pocket “B” movies on which his reputation rests – from a story by former actress Seena Oewn turned into a script by Karl Kamb. The conceit of Carnegie Hall is that a young orphan g...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Right now I’m listening to the fourth and last CD in the four-disc boxed set Miles Davis at Newport, 1955-1975, which turned out to be a disappointment. I ordered it from Amazon.com largely to get the legendary July 17, 1955 jam session at Newport – only the second year the festival occurred and Miles’ heroic comeback after dealing with heroin addiction and his “hit-bottom” moment when he was arrested for armed robbery in New York City in 1953. I told that story to my husband Charles yesterday morning and he was startled to realize that Miles was actually guilty – he wasn’t just some random Black guy being harassed by a racist cop. Miles’ own recollection of that incident was that when he was being handcuffed, he was thinking to himself, “I came from a respectable middle-class Black family in East St. Louis, My parents raised me to be better than this.” As soon as he served whatever legal jeopardy t...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Right now I’m listening to my copies of two of the three final albums by Nico, the enigmatic chanteuse who sang four songs on the first Velvet Underground album and went on to make a series of haunting solo albums that sold virtually nothing. I dug out tne Nico CD’s because last night my husband Charles and I watched a half-hour documentary on Nico, Nico: Autopsy of an Icon ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3f3pYnZz7c&t=1s ), produced and directed by a woman who calls herself “A grrrl’s two sound cents.” It was a remarkable vest-pocket portrait of this oddball artist who seems to have defined the terms “eclectic” and “boundary-breaking.” Nico was born October 16, 1938 in Cologne (Köln, to use the German spelling), Germany. Her father, Wilhelm Päffgen, was an heir to a brewery fortune who was drafted into the Wehrmacht at the outset of World War II and supposedly died in the war, though resear...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the seventh concert in this year’s International Organ Festival Monday nights at 7:30. The featured organist was Caroline Robinson of the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, Georgia, and she played an impressive program of mostly unfamiliar music – though at least two pieces on her program were also played by other organists in this year’s series. Robinson began with an exuberant early 20th-century work called “Variations de Concert” by Joseph Bonnet (1884-1944), a typical piece of French organ literature from the turn of the last century. It was Bonnet’s Opus 1 (meaning either the first piece he composed or the first he published), and it has the excitement of exploring musical possibilities that one would expect from an Op. 1. Next she played two works in quick succession, a “Gospel Prelude” on the hymn “Wh...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Once my husband Charles and I had watched last night’s movies – the 2021 Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival DVD and the Lifetime movie A Dangerous Affair – I played him a fascinating CD I just just got from Amazon.com: Woody Guthrie Live Wire, dubbed from a 1949 live recording of the great American folk singer made on a wire recorder. Wire recording was a primitive forerunner of tape recording, and the two worked on the same principle – encoding sound on magnetic material through an electromagnet and playing it back by reading the same magnetic impulses – but wire recording was considerably less practical. To make the system work, the wire had to be preposterously thin – about the width of a human hair – and the wire had to move through the recorder at fast speed to get any decent sound quality. What’s more, the wire would easily snap, resulting in a tangled mess (tape recordings sometimes did that, too...