Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Sunday, February 26 at 9:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite remarkable film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” as part of their commemoration of Black History Month. The film was Within Our Gates (1920), produced, directed and written by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was born in Metropolis,,Illinois on January 2, 1884,t he fifth child of a Black farm couple. Though his Wikipedia page doesn’t specify it I’ve long suspected Micheaux was mixed-race, not only because he had a French last name (many of the mixed-race Creoles in Louisiana had French last names, mainly because the French were more easygoing about race mixing than the Anglos) but because so many of his films,including this one, feature mixed-race characters. A number of Micheaux’ films feature a young Black man who’s strongly in love with a white-looking woman; he’s torn be...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Saturday afternoon, February 25 at 5 p.m., I went to a quite intriguing concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Fufth and Nutmeg, featuring the so-called “Duo Azure” of saxophonist Benson Lee and pianist John Solari. The concert was hosted by Nicholas Halbert, the young organist from San Diego who’s studying at Arizona State University and has brought some members of the classical music department to perform at St. Paul’s, including Lee and Solari. Both at his Friday afternoon organ recital and before this concert, Halbert told the audience that probably none of you have ever been to a live concert of classical saxophone. I have; I remember years ago at the old San Diego Public Library on 8th and “E” seeing a baritone saxophonist play two of Johnan Sebastian Bach’s suits for unaccompanied cello, and since the baritone sax sounds in the same register as the cello he was able to play the pi...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved https://www.spreckelsorgan.org , and found that the regular civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, was not playing. From the moment I attended his audition concert 4 ½ years ago,I’ve been appalled by Raúl’s on-stage act– he’s a capable musician who’s at his best in music that’s loud and bombastic, but his stage raps I just find infuriating. Instead today’s concert featured Emma Whitten, associate organist at Christ Cathedral (formerly tte Crystal Cathedral of Robert Schuller’s independent ministry, now owned by the Roman Catholic Church) and also the organist at a church in Riverside, though she lives in Oceanside in San Diego’s North County. She brought along a good friend and fellow Oceanside resident, Maria Miller, a singer who was billed as a soprano but she sounds nire kuje a nezzo to me. Whitten gave a meat-and-potatoes organ recital with a few vocal features for Miller added. She opened with a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Once again my plans for a Sunday afternoon and early evening were short-circuited by a rainstorm – or at least the threat of one, since it actually hasn’t done much (so far, at least) except sprinkle – but the rain led to the cancellation of the Spreckels Organ Pavilion concert about three-quarters of the way through and I decided to bail o my original plan to walk across Balboa Park and attend the Evensong service at St. Paul’s and the organ recital scheduled after it. The Organ Pavilion concert was billed as a tribute to the Beatles, and the program for the show listed 12 songs by The Beatles plus one,”Imagine,” recorded by John Lennon in 1971 after the Beatles broke up. The program also said the concert would start with the Ukrainian national anthem, which San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez has been doing at just about every concert since Russia launched the sudden and unprovoked war o...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Sunday, February 5, I watched the 65th annual Grammy Awards telecast on CBS, which turned out to be the lumbering beast awards shows usually turn into. The host was Trevor Noah, who’s not one of my favorite people, though he made a few rather obvious attempts at topical humor, including a joke about the Chinese “weather balloon” that drifted obnoxiously over the United States and just happened to fly over states with major U.S. military installations. The 65th annual Grammy Awards show was billed as the first in three years not hampered by COVID-19 restrictions (though I just read a report that the Journal of the American Medical Association has just published a study revealing that COVID-19 is still the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S.), and the producers shifted the balance dramatically from actual musical performances to giving out awards. In previous years the Grammy telecast has...