Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, July 30) I went to a “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring Ginger Cowgirl, whom I’d previously seen at a “Twilight in the Park” concert a few years ago. I’d enjoyed her act so much I wanted to make sure I went back to see it, and I was glad I did. “Ginger Cowgirl” is both a band name and a pseudonym for country singer Stacy Antonel, who won a TV singing contest called Three Minutes to Stardom in 2017 and quit her job (her Web site, https://www.stacyantonel.com , didn’t say what it was) to focus full time on music. A San Diego native, she eventually moved to country music’s unofficial capital, Nashville, Tennessee and she’s recorded an EP as “Ginger Cowgirl” and a full-length CD, Always the Outsider , under her real name. She and her second vocalist both wore antennas to look like space aliens, and she explained that was in honor of a son...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 29) the Spreckels Organ Society presented the seventh out of their series of 12 concerts for this year’s Summer Organ Festival, held every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park through September 2. The organist was Jan Kraybill, a stout middle-aged blonde woman who works in Kansas City (her program bio didn’t say on which side of the river – there’s a Kansas City, Kansas and a Kansas City, Missouri) as conservator of the organ at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (which according to its Web site is in Kansas City, Missouri, by far the larger of the two). She started playing piano at three and organ at 14, and never wanted to be anything other than a musician. She’s also organist in residence at the Community of Christ Headquarters and organist at Village on Antioch Presbyterian Church. (I’ve joked, “Who’s the most unemployable pe...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 22) my husband Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the sixth concert in their 36th annual Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Korean-born Jaebon Hwang, and the first thing that struck me about her when she finally came out after an extended eight-minute introduction by one of the homely middle-aged guys from the Spreckels Organ Society board was how tall she was. There’s a stereotype about Asian women classical musicians that they’re all petite little living china dolls. Hwang is quite tall and well-proportioned. The program she selected emphasized the gentler side of the organ and mostly avoided big, spectacular blockbusters. Hwang began with a “Toccata” by John Weaver (1937-2021), and then did an intriguing program of Baroque pieces transcribed for organ rather than originally composed for it. First up in that department was an “Arioso” by Joha...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing DVD of Verdi’s next-to-last opera, Otello , with a text by Arrigo Boïto (whose opera Mefistofele is my all-time favorite Italian opera composed by anyone other than Verdi or Puccini) based on Shakespeare’s play Othello . By now just about everyone knows the story: Othello/Otello is a Moorish (i.e., Black – in the original Italian story, Geraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi , “Otello Moro” was just the character’s name, but the translator of the English version from which Shakespeare worked read “Moro” as “Moor” and therefore made Othello Black) general who has been appointed by the rulers of Venice to subjugate and rule their colony on Cyprus. He’s met and married Desdemona, daughter of a Venetian senator, and moved with her to Cyprus (where the opera begins, Verdi and Boïto having lopped off the entire first act of the play), o...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 15) my husband Charles and I went to the fifth of this year’s series of 12 Monday night organ concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The featured organist was a young woman named Clara Gerdes, who we’re told at the end of her biography “lives in New Jersey with her husband and her son.” (That phraseology struck me as odd: why not “her husband and their son,” unless the boy is the product of a previous relationship of hers?) Both Charles and I were struck by how petite she is – as with some of the children who’ve won scholarships on the organ, it seemed like she’d have a hard time reaching all three manuals and the foot pedals – but she played magnificently, especially in offbeat repertoire. Gerdes opened with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 550, and she was quite good but not exceptional. Then, as if she’d needed the Bach ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, July 10) I went to the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park for the third night in the row to catch the rock covers band 8 Track Highway, whom I’d seen there before but seemed quite a bit better now. They advertise themselves as a band covering California rock from the 1970’s and 1980’s, so it was a welcome surprise when they kicked off their set with a late-1950’s classic: Buddy Holly’s “It’s So Easy.” While it soon became apparent that they’d learned the song from Linda Ronstadt’s cover – especially when they went into the a cappella vocal break Ronstadt inserted – it was still a nice way to open the show. After a second song which appeared to be called “We Got Love,” the band’s front person announced that their next song would be something by the band Pure Prairie League, whom I’d heard of in the day but didn’t remember actually having heard. My best guess of the titl...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, July 9) I went to the latest “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion, featuring a band called “American Flyboys” who have an unusual concept. Musically they’re a big band in the classic style of 1935-1945, with brass (trumpets and trombones), reeds (all saxophones) and rhythm (electronic keyboard, electric bass and two drummers, one playing a regular trap set and one playing congas and bongos, the latter with sticks instead of by hand). But their repertoire consists mostly of pop-rock songs of the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s arranged in swing-band style. They opened with a hot version of the Rumours -era Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” and then played Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” They identified the last song with Tina Turner instead, but given how completely Tina transformed this song (slowing it down at the beginning...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 8) my husband Charles and I went to the fourth concert of the 36th annual Summer Organ Festival at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The featured organist was Bryan Anderson, a quite accomplished young organist (in his early 30’s, married to a woman, with two children already and a third on the way, he said) who serves as the musical director of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas – though he said he isn’t a Texas native and the usual online sources don’t specify exactly where he was born. He won the 2023 Longwood Gardens International Organ Competition in Philadelphia (after placing second in the same event in 2019), and that’s how he got to play in San Diego: San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, was one of the Longwood Gardens judges. Anderson’s program got off to a slow start – his opener was Eric Coates’ “ Dam Busters March,” a theme ...

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...