Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Two nights ago (Saturday, October 28) I went to a Hallowe’en concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, which turned out to be an indigestible mess consisting of San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez performing songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals The Phantom of the Opera and the far less well-known sequel, Love Never Dies . (You didn’t know there was a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera ? Neither did I.) The songs were sung by two of Raúl’s favorite local singers, Anna Belaya and Bernardo Bermudez. Belaya, who regularly appeared at the Organ Pavilion for a while after the start of the Ukraine-Russia war (oops, sorry, “special military operation”) to kick off Raúl’s concerts with the Ukrainian national anthem and one or two Ukrainian folk songs as a show of solidarity, is billed as a soprano but sounds more like a mezzo to me. Bermudez is billed as a “bari-tenor” and he’s...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After the 1930 comedy Soup to Nuts my husband Charles and I watched a show on KPBS I was really looking forward to: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, an American Masters episode about the great drummer and civil-rights activist Max Roach. Born in January 1924, Roach, along with the older Kenny Clarke, was the pioneer of the bebop drumming style. He got his first big break at age 18 when he was hired as a substitute for Duke Ellington’s regular drummer, Sonny Greer, at the Paramount Theatre in Manhattan. In December 1943, at age 19, he made his first recordings with a quartet led by tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and by March 1944 he was recording with a Hawkins-led big band that also featured trumpeter John “Dizzy” Gillespie. Bebop revolutionized jazz with its advanced harmonies and rhythms, and one of the key changes Clarke and Roach made in playing jazz drums was to transfer the basic puls...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, October 21) there was a quite charming concert at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Mission Hills near UCSD Medical Center featuring keyboard players Barbara Scheidker and Kenneth Herman. Barbara Scheidker is a new name to me but Ken Herman has been a friend of my husband Charles and I literally for decades. We’ve often seen him on buses in the area, and he’s always fun to talk to despite – or maybe because of – his rather snobby attitudes towards culture in general and music in particular. But I’ve never heard him as a performing musician before, and he’s quite impressive. The program opened with a two-movement “Sonata for Two Organs,” with Herman playing the church’s main organ and Scheidker playing the smaller tracker organ. The work is variously attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporary Muzio Clementi, though musicologists are still arguing over w...