Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Thursday, July 4) I turned on KPBS for the 44th annual A Capitol Fourth concert despite my weird misgivings about this country and its likely fate. America is celebrating the 248th anniversary of its independence just three days after the U.S. Supreme Court spectacularly reversed one of the central tenets of why we were fighting the revolution in the first place: to have leaders we could hold accountable instead of untouchable kings. Earlier in the day I’d seen an interview clip with Kevin Roberts, executive director of the Heritage Foundation, which has put together a blueprint called “Project 2025” which they propose to have Donald Trump implement on his second term (the way they did a similar blueprint in 1980 for Ronald Reagan). Roberts calls it a “second American Revolution,” though it would be more accurate to call it the “American Counterrevolution.” Among its objectives are a na

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s (Wednesday, July 3) “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park was by a five-piece band called “Breez’n” that made me wonder if they were a George Benson tribute band (George Benson’s commercial breakthrough was with an album called Breezin’ ). Their banner called themselves “San Diego’s Variety Band,” and they did indeed play a variety of covers, some of which I recognized and some I didn’t. For some reason their Web site, https://breezn.com, doesn’t contain a personnel listing, but they’re a five-piece band consisting of a blonde female lead singer who also plays electronic keyboards, a saxophonist, a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer. They began their concert last night with two nondescript disco numbers whose titles I guessed as “Dance, Dance, Dance” and “Dancing in September.” Ironically, this was after the guitar player, who did most of the on-

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, July 2) my husband Charles and I went to one of the stronger concerts I’ve ever heard in the Twilight in the Park series at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion. The group was the Coronado Big Band, which judging from the fact that they were advertised in the Twilight in the Park program as “Swing, Big Band Music” and that we’d heard one of the saxophonists warming up before the concert with the opening lick of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” (the one for which the Beatles were sued for plagiarism because they lifted it for the coda of “All You Need Is Love”) I’d assumed would be a swing-era nostalgia band. That couldn’t have been more wrong! Though the lineup was that of a classic-era swing band – four trumpets, four trombones (one of them a bass trombone), five saxes (two altos, two tenors and a baritone) and three rhythm (electric piano, electric bass and drums – apparently the pia

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 1) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to see and hear the holiday concert presented by organist Jelani Eddington, who has an unusual background. He was born in Muncie, Indiana and trained to be an attorney. Eddington’s start in music occurred when his grandmother started teaching him piano at age 4. At age 8 he went to a pizza parlor that featured a pipe organ and he was mesmerized. “Unlike most pipe organs, this particular instrument was installed in a way that you could see many of the organ’s working parts,” Eddington recalled. “I was fascinated that one person could control all of the facets and sounds of the instrument, and I decided in that moment that I wanted to learn to play one.” Eddington moved to New York City shortly after he graduated from law school, but in 2003 he relocated to Milwaukee mainly because he thought he’d