Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, August 29) was the final concert in the 2024 “Twilight in the Park” series, featuring Matthew Phillips. I’d assumed he was a folk-style singer-songwriter; instead he’s a hard rock singer-guitarist who reminded me of the short-lived early-1980’s artist Rick Springfield. I said “short-lived” because Springfield’s career peaked early (with the enormous 1981 hit “Jessie’s Girl”), even though according to Wikipedia he was born in 1949 and is still alive. Like Springfield, Phillips is boyishly handsome, and he’s an immense beneficiary of the wireless technology that has allowed electric guitarists to roam free around the venue, untethered by the long cords they used to need to connect their guitars to their amps. Phillips moved around the Organ Pavilion unencumbered by any need to stay physically connected to his equipment, and though his on-stage band featured only himself, bass gu...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, August 28) I went to the next-to-last “Twilight in the Park” concert of this summer’s season, and since he had the day off work my husband Charles was able to come with me. The band was the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra, named after Glenn Miller’s theme song, and as their name suggests they’re mostly a cover band of 1930’s and 1940’s swing classics. But they’ve broadened their repertoire enough to encompass songs like Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” Ritchie Valens’s and Los Lobos’s “La Bamba” (their front person, singer Ed de Brach, seemed confused by the two hit versions of the song), Billy Joel’s “My Life” ( not “Just the Way You Are,” which would have fitted more closely to their usual material), Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” and The Champs’ 1958 instrumental novelty hit “Tequila.” Their musical director is Bob Tutleman, ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, August 27) I went to the second-from-last series of “Twilight in the Park” concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring a quite good ensemble called the Coronado Concert Band. A “concert band” is actually a quite large group consisting of all the major instruments of a symphony orchestra except strings – though one of the key numbers on their concert last night included a guest violinist. The program was advertised as “From Hollywood to Broadway,” and I was grateful that for once at one of these concerts there was a printed program, so I didn’t have to scribble down frantic notes on what they were playing. As you’d guess from the title, the concert was given over to songs and instrumental pieces from Broadway musicals and film scores – and sometimes, notably the two songs from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story , Broadway music...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 26) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” a showing of a silent film in the Pavilion with live organ accompaniment. The film was Steamboat Bill, Jr. , a 1928 comedy starring Buster Keaton and his last made independently with Joseph M. Schenck as his producer. The organist was David Marsh, a young man who performed in a floral print shirt and tight blue jeans. Though his photo in the program shows him as blond, when he appeared last night he had dark hair and at first Charles mistook him for San Diego’s regular civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez. Marsh is based in Orange County, where he’s the president of the Orange County Theatre Organ Society. He teaches piano and music theory and used to be director of music technology at Villa Park High School. He’s also refreshingly sly and self-depre...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Works reviewed in this post: The Seven Ages of Elvis (Sky UK, Fireball Television, Raydar Media, Bleat Post Production, So Speedy, 2017) Sun Records Sings Elvis Presley (Sun 015047809769, LP, 2024) Elvis Aron Presley (RCA 07863 67455-2, 4 CD’s, 1982; originally 8 LP’s, 1980) Last Saturday, August 17 – just a day after the 47th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley on August 16 1977 – PBS showed a documentary called The Seven Ages of Elvis. The ultra-pretentious title has become all too typical of projects featuring or documenting the successful but troubled life of Elvis Presley. It comes from William Shakespeare’s quote from As You Like It : “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” According to David Upshal, who produced and directed The Seven ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 19) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the 10th of the 12 concerts in this year’s 36th annual Summer Organ Festival. This featured San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez along with 30 orchestral musicians under the direction of Michael Gerdes, director of orchestral studies at San Diego State University. Gerdes conducted a 32-piece pickup ensemble billed as “The Organ Pavilion Chamber Symphony,” which I suspect consisted of musicians from the San Diego Symphony as well as some of his students at San Diego State. The program consisted of two concerti for organ and string orchestra from the 18th century, an Organ Concerto in F by Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) and another Organ Concerto in F (one wonders whether that was a congenial key for the organs of that time!) by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Mixed in with thos...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, August 15) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to hear a quite good salsa band, Charlie Chávez y su Afrotruko. They played 11 songs, more or less – I say “more or less” because some of them blended into each other – and I had to use the Google song-identification app this afternoon to figure out what they had played since all the singing was in Spanish. Two of the songs even threw Google: one they played midway through the set which I guessed was called “La Rumba” because that’s the word I heard most often in the lyric, and their encore, which turned out to be a piece by Tito Puente ( that I was able to make out from their announcement!) from 1958 called “Mambo Gozón.” I’m not sure which of the males on the stage was Charlie Chávez – though I think he was the heavy-set, fully bearded timbales player who periodically emerged from b...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I went back to Balboa Park last night for the 6:30 performance of one of my favorite local bands, the Bayou Brothers, at the “Twilight in the Park” series in the Organ Pavilion. I first heard the Bayou Brothers when they played a holiday-music concert in the old Mission Hills Library in 2016 (I think), and they played an infectious mix of holiday songs and New Orleans standards. They call themselves a “Zydeco/Cajun” band and they’re able to mix those two related styles into an appealing blend. They opened last night’s concert with a song I’d heard them play at that holiday show as well even though it’s not holiday-themed: “Dance All Night (Stay a Little Longer),” first recorded by Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan in 1945 and best known today in Willie Nelson’s cover. I hadn’t realized it was so amenable to a New Orleans treatment until I heard the Bayou Brothers do it that first time. After that they wen...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, August 13) I went to another of the “Twilight in the Park” concerts at the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, featuring a group called the Classic Buzz Band, though they originally named themselves the Old Geezers’ Garage Band because their members were middle-aged to senior citizens playing the music of their 1970’s youths. I enjoyed them and particularly the guitar virtuosity of Dave Grube, who played lead on most of their songs and was especially good at duplicating the virtuosity of the late Eddie Van Halen, two of whose songs they played … sort of. As usual, how much I liked a particular song depended largely on how much I’d liked the original version “in the day.” They opened with The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” in a version that (like most of their renditions) closely copied the original. My husband Charles and I had heard a band in Martinez, California (where we...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 12) my husband Charles and I went to the ninth of 12 organ concerts in Balboa Park Monday night, featuring David Ball, principal organist and music director of Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. The building was originally Crystal Cathedral and was famous for being made almost entirely of glass. It was the home church for maverick televangelist Robert Schuller and his “Hour of Power” broadcasts until Schuller and his father (who had founded the ministry in the first place) got into a nasty argument that led to the church going out of business. It was bought by the Roman Catholic diocese in the area and reconsecrated as a Catholic cathedral, and the state-of-the-art organ the Schullers had commissioned and got funded by philanthropist Hazel Wright was restored and put back into service. I ran across this instrument when Gothic Records released two CD’s, The Haze...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, August 8) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Pavilion to see and hear MOXIE, one of my favorite local bands. MOXIE is an all-woman cover band featuring Marci Knoles (keyboards), Nancy Shields and Pynne Looper (guitars), Susan Stevenson on bass guitar and Wendy Conners (drums). I’ve seen them several times before, mostly at previous “Twilight in the Park” concerts, though their best appearance was at a semi-private street party they threw on Adams Avenue in the late 2010’s. What made this one special was that in addition to playing three blazing-hot rock sets, they started with the individual members of MOXIE playing singer-songwriter type originals – which led me to wish that MOXIE would give up just being a cover band and start incorporating original material, since they’re quite good songwriters. I got off the bus one stop early tha...