Breez'n Does O.K. Performance at "Twilight in the Park" Concert at Organ Pavilion July 3

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-stage announcements, had joked about them looking like The Beach Boys since the males in the band were all wearing matching flower-printed shirts (and the woman was wearing a similar shirt, though of a different print). That only made me wish their first song had been a cover of the Beach Boys’ “Dance, Dance, Dance” instead! After that they at least got into more familiar (for me) 1980’s rock territory: Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” the B-52’s “Love Shack,” Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love” and Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing.” The guitarist sang lead on the last one and, given that Mark Knopfler’s lyrics specifically state, “We don’t want no trumpet-playing band” (ironic because the real Sultans of Swing, a short-lived mid-sized band led by Al Cooper in 1937-1941, lists five trumpeters, though only two were in the band at any one time; they were also known as the Savoy Sultans since they took over as house band of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem following the death of Chick Webb in 1939, though according to their Wikipedia page they’d actually played at the Savoy while Webb was still alive), it was ironic that the Breez’n sax player was very much a part of the song. Then they did a seemingly interminable song called “Without Love” that I couldn’t place – except it once again had me thinking of a much better song with that title (Nick Lowe’s, from the 1979 Labour of Lust LP).

After that they said they were going to do a Beatles cover, which they sort-of did; they did “Twist and Shout,” which the Beatles performed but it was their cover of the Isley Brothers’ Black hit (and the Isleys weren’t even the first band to do it – another Black group, The Top Notes, were), and the sax player played the lick that on the Isleys’ record was played by two trumpets and on the Beatles’ cover was played by a guitar. Then they went even further back into rock history and covered Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” after which they did the recent Brooks and Dunn country hit “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” (which at least led the rather formless dancers in the audience off to one side of the stage to form a line for the line dance for which that song was written) and what they announced as a Santana cover whose title I guessed as “Just Like the Ocean.” (At least they didn’t play “Black Magic Woman” and announce it as a Santana song the way they did with the Beatles and “Twist and Shout.” “Black Magic Woman” was actually written by Peter Green and first recorded by him as a member of the original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac!). Then they did “Taking Care of Business” from Bachman-Turner Overdrive in 1973, Meghan Trainor’s debut single “All About That Bass” from 2014, and something called “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson with Bruno Mars. That one really annoyed me; the woman singer began it with a virtual order to the audience members to get up and dance (one of the things I liked least about disco was this almost fascistic insistence that people must dance to it; more than once I’ve said the reason I liked ABBA was they wrote dance songs that actually made you feel like you wanted to dance instead of like you were being ordered to). Fortunately the encore really picked things up and was by a wide margin my favorite song of the night. It was “At Last,” the old Glenn Miller early-1940’s hit as remodeled by Etta James as soul. The blonde woman got out from behind her keyboard, took center stage and sang with real soul and conviction.