Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Friday, January 27, right after we saw the film Home Alone 3 , my husband Charles and I watched a neatly engaging Live at the Belly Up episode featuring Tennessee-based band Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors. According to Holcomb’s interstitial interviews, he founded the band in 2007 after briefly pursuing a career as a solo artist. One of his band members was 17 years old at the time the band was founded and there were plenty of gigs he couldn’t play because he was too young to be in a place where alcohol was served. Later Holcomb attended the University of Tennessee, and by the time he graduated, his sideman was over 21 and could therefore play with the band as a full member. The musicians in The Neighbors are Ian Miller (the cutest one) on keyboards, Nathan Dugger on lead guitar and pedal steel guitar (this is one of those bands in which the lead singer plays acoustic guitar as a rhythm instrum

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion concert in Balboa Park Sunday, January 15 at 2 p.m., but bailed and headed home instead of going on to St. Paul’s for that night’s Evensong service and the recital by organist Emma Whitten that was to follow. I went to the Organ Pavilion in spite of the predictions that, though it wasn’t raining this morning, it would be by 5 p.m. I ran into an old friend in the park, and he said the weather prediction he had got from his cell phone was that tie rain would start precisely at 2 p.m. and he expressed his opinion that those of us who were going to the concert were nuts, and so were the organizers for putting it on in the face of likely rain. Well, the rain held off for most of the afternoon but really opened up big-time during the final selection (aside from the inevitable closer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven,” in an arrangement by

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After the feature film my husband Charles and I watched last night, White Savage, I switched back to KPBS for this week’s episode of Live at the Belly Up featuring an act called Joseph. When I first saw the name I assumed Joseph was a single male singer-songwriter, perhaps using just his first name à la Prince, but no-o-o-o-o, Joseph actually turned out to be a band of three sisters, Natalie Schepman and Allison and Meegan Closner. Since their Web site, https://thebandjoseph.com , does not contain a biography page and none of the other online information I’ve been able to find out about them has explained it, I’m not sure why the three sisters have two different last names. Did Matalie get married and start using her husband’s name? (That hardly seems likely for 2019, when this show was filmed.) Or is Natalie, who by her own account on the show’s interstitial interviews is four years older than

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Right now I’m listening to one of the most oddly premised CD boxed sets in history: The Johann Strauss Collection, an eight-CD release from the Japanese Opus Kura label which I acquired about a decade ago and whose first CD contains no fewer than 13 versions of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (“An der schönen blauen Donau,” to give it its official title in German), starting with the one conducted by Johann Strauss III (which, despite his name, was not the son of Johann Strauss, Jr., who wrote the piece, but ratner was Strauss, Jr.’s nephew, the son of his brother Eduard Strauss). The disc moves on to versions conducted by “name” musicians Felix Weingartner, Erich Kleiber, Clemens Krauss – along with choral versions by something called the “Lehrer-Gesangverein Berlin-Neuköln,” a Japanese women’s chorus with soprano Shigo Yano, and some at least marginally more famous singers – Frieda Hempel, Maria

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After that PBS showed an Austin City Limits episode featuring Jon Batiste, the former musical director for Stephen Cplbert’s late-night show before he made a quite successful album of his own that won Album of the Year at the last Grammy Awards. I loved Jon Batiste not only musically but physically – he’s drop-dead gorgeous and easily made my list of “Straight Guys I Wish Were Gay” – but on this show I thought he was trying too hard to be both a musical icon and a sex god. Batiste performed the first half of his show in a red outfit with an open jacket that flashed his bare chest, and the second half (after making the change in the middle of a song!) ini a cowboy hat and a striped suit. It was as if he decided to perform the first half as James Brown and the second as Cab Calloway. Batiste announced at the start of the snow, and againi about two-thirds in, that he considered it not just a musical

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I watched all but the first 15 minutes of a peculiar PBS New Year’s special called United in Song 2022: Ringing In the New Year Together. It was an oddly frustrating program in that instead of the usual New York Philharmonic concert with which PBS rings in the new year, it was a concert led by the American “Pops” Orchestra and its director, Luke Frazier, in a not very digestible blend of light classics, standards (“Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Que Será., Será” and a nice ballroom dance by Tiler Peck and Román Mejia to an instrumental version of “I’ll Be Seeing You”), 1970’s pop hits (like “Make Your Own Kind of Music” sung by someone or something called MILCK, all caps and with an extra “c”), some things that sounded like originals and quite a lot of Christian rock. The “inspirational” selections reneged from old spirituals like “Ain’t That Good News” (sung by a large Black man named