Music Magg

Organist Clark Wilson Presents Eccentric Pre-Film Medley, but Supplies Able Accompaniment for the Film by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 28) my husband Charles and I went to the annual silent movie night at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We left home at about 4:15 p.m. and got to the Pavilion at 5 – and were a bit surprised to find it almost empty. In previous years Charles had got there way early to stake us out a seat near enough to the screen where we could actually see the movie, but though the place was pretty packed this year it wasn’t anywhere nearly as crowded as it’s been in years past. (I think a lot of people have still not got back into the habit of going out after COVID-19.) The film was Harold Lloyd’s 1925 college comedy The Freshman , which we’ve seen before, and the live organist accompanying it was Clark Wilson, an Ohio-based musician and organ curator who, according to hi...

Two Band Units Play Swing, Pop and Conventional March Material. by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, August 24) I went to the final concert in this year’s “Twilight in the Park” series at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The featured act was the U.S. Navy Band Southwest, led by Lt. Matt Shea, and their concert was actually divided into two parts with an intermission between them. This lengthened the program to the point where it didn’t end until 8 p.m., and the temperature was getting chilly enough I actually needed the jacket I’d knotted around my waist before the night was through. The first part was mostly big-band swing and pop, beginning with a version of the 1931 song “All of Me” based on one Count Basie’s band recorded in the mid-1950’s. Then they did something they called “Sing the Same Song” which was actually a tweaked version of Benny Goodman’s 1937 swing classic “Sing, Sing, Sing” (itself a tweak ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Wednesday, August 23, after my husband Charles got back from work, we watched an intriguing 43-minute YouTube video on Beatles drummer Ringo Starr called Ringo Starr: One of Them ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mHop-TmIzQ ). It featured interviews with two of the other three, Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon, though the main authority figure was someone I’d never heard of before, Sid Griffin. Apparently he’s a Louisville native, an eighth-generation Kentuckian and a long-standing country-rock musician who’s been in a series of bands including The Long Ryders, The Coal Porters (a marvelous pun) and Western Electric, as well as briefly a member of punk bands called Death Wish and The Unclaimed. He made a privately produced EP with The Unclaimed in 1980 on the Moxie label that contained his first recorded songs. Griffin is also a biographer of country-rock legend Gram Parsons (a drug cas...

Great night of vintage blues and soul, with a "ringer" tribute to Tony Bennett. by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s (Wednesday, August 23) “Twilight in the Park” concert featured a band I’d seen in earlier years, Lady J and the Soulful Knights. I got to sit in the third row and right next to me were Lady J’s daughter and grandson – I “got” the connection between them when the grandson helped her get onstage. I’ve seen Lady J at previous “Twilight in the Park” concerts at which she sang soul classics like Etta James’s “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” (also a regular repertoire item for the all-woman, all-white band MOXIE,” but Lady J’s version so totally blew MOXIE’s out of the water she could have said to them, “Pretty fly for white girls”) and the Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin “Respect.” Last night she didn’t do either of those but she did play an electrifying set opening with a blues instrumental during which ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, August 22) I got my husband Charles to come with me for the “Twilight in the Park” concert in Balboa Park featuring the Coronado Concert Band, a larger and more professional-sounding group than the Kearny Mesa Concert Band I’d seen there on August 15. The Coronado Concert Band was led by conductor and musical director Fred Lee, who announced that not only his children but his grandchildren were in the audience. As luck would have it, we were sitting just behind an older woman who had a quite nice and well-behaved dog with her; she explained that her husband of 43 years is in the band. He plays baritone sax, and this irks her no end because they’re currently in the smallest living space they’ve ever shared and the baritone sax (as well as his other saxes) takes up an awful lot of room there. The Coronado Concert Band played quite well – though I think one of their trumpet player...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Two nights ago (Monday, August 14) my husband Charles and I went to the eighth of the 11 Monday night organ concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and eight brass players from the San Diego Symphony: trumpeters Christopher Smith, Ray Nowak and Jonah Levy; trombonists Kyle Covington and Kyle Mendigucha; French horn players Darby Hinshaw and Tricia Skye; and tuba player Scott Sutherland (replacing the originally scheduled Aaron McCalla. The concert was called “An Early Stereophonic Stravaganza” (and no, I have no idea why “stravaganza” was spelled that way unless Raúl, a native Spanish speaker, likes it better), and the first half was all Baroque music by obscure (and, if you ask me, deservedly so) composers: Giovanni Bonaventura Viviani (1638-1693), Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), and Giovanni Gabrieli (1554-1612). My pro...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday evening (Tuesday, August 15) I went to a “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring the Kearny Mesa Concert Band, an estimable ensemble that is organized under the auspices of Mesa Community College – though you don’t get college credit for being in it. They were founded in 1972 and originally were a fully accredited music class at Mesa College, though in the mid-1980’s they transitioned from a Mesa College music class to a “continuing education class.” Their current music director is Richard Almanza, who led the group since 2016, and along with him there was a pudgy young man (a boy, really) who helped with the sound check. The concert opened with “An American Fanfare” by Rick Kirby, and then Almanza announced the next piece – “Chorale and Shaker Hymn” by John Zdechlik – and challenged us to name and recognize the familiar tune on which the piece was b...

Works by John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Robert and Kristen Anderson Lopez Draw Big Crowd by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 7) my husband Charles and I went to the seventh of the 11 Monday night organ concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. This is the 35th annual summer organ festival – it consists of 11 Monday night concerts, which started June 26 and will conclude with a rock tribute on Labor Day, September 4 – though of course there wasn’t one in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, and while there was one in 2021 it actually took place in September and October and was clearly thrown together at the last minute. This year’s run of concerts has been uncommonly good: last night’s featured organist Martin Ellis and its theme was “Music in Movies!” Instead of a traditional biography Ellis contributed a short essay in the program regarding the connection between music and m...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Monday, July 31) my husband Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion for the sixth out of the 11 Monday night concerts in this year’s summer organ festival, featuring a favorite musician of mine: Emma Whitten, a resident of Oceanside in San Diego’s North County and a frequent guest organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral Church in Bankers’ Hill between Hillcrest and downtown. I recently bought CD’s featuring Whitten and David Ball, another organist who’s played here a few times, recorded on the Hazel Wright Organ at what used to be the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove but, after its builders, Robert H. Schuller Ministries, went bankrupt in 2010 the building was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in 2012 and modified to accommodate the Catholic liturgy. The building was re-consecrated and reopened in 2019 and is now known as Christ Cathedral, and the organ was subsequently also restor...