Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, July 24), my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring 3 Car Garage (the second group in the season, after 8 Track Highway, whose name begins with a number), a quite entertaining cover band even though when I wrote yesterday’s journal entry I copied the paragraph from their Web site listing the wide variety of acts they covered. Charles read it and wondered how they could put together a credible set list from songs by bands so diverse, but they managed it. We got there early enough to hear their sound check, doing the song “Amie” (pronounced “Amy”) by Pure Prairie League, a band I remember seeing ads for “in the day” but never actually listening to. The actual set began with a song called “How Long” by Ace, followed by Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309 (Jenny)” – an interesting ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, July 15) I played hooky from my review responsibilities for Fanfare magazine and attended a “Twilight in the Park” organ concert in Balboa Park featuring Ginger Cowgirl, the stage name for the quite appealing Stacy Antonel. She grew up in San Diego but after she fell in love with country music, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 2017 to try to make it as a big star in country music’s citadel. Alas, she proved to be too small a fish in a big pond, though she has a great voice and a great bod, showcase last night in an all-black outfit featuring a black shirt and skin-tight black pants. Stacy Antonel says on her Web site she discovered country music through the $1 record rack at a local thrift store. On her “Twilight in the Park” set she played an appealing mix of originals and classic country covers, some of the latter from her new three-song EP Stacy Antonel and the Seahorse...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 14) my husband Charles and I went to the second concert in the Monday night summer series the Spreckels Organ Society puts on every year in Balboa Park (though there wasn’t one in 2020 and a late-in-the-year one in 2021 due to the COVID-19 lockdowns). The concert was a sheer delight! It was given by British organist Richard Hills, who’s described in his official bio as “one of the very few musicians truly to have bridged and mastered the divide between the world of the classical organ and that of the theatre organ.” Actually, his program at the Spreckels Organ was more heavily weighted towards the theatre organ side, and it opened with a piece that itself bridged the gap. It was an organ transcription of the overture to the 1831 operetta Zampa by French composer Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833). It not only sounded very much like the sort of music used to accompany action sce...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 7) my husband Charles and I went to the first of the nine scheduled Monday night summer organ concerts (two fewer than in most recent years) at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The organist was Joshua Stafford, a nice-looking youngish man who’s the Minister of Music at the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio. He also has a direct connection to the Organ Pavilion since he now holds the Jared Jacobsen chair at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. Jacobsen himself had had that gig from 1996 until his tragic death in a car accident in Ohio in August 2019. Before that he’d been San Diego Civic Organist from 1978 to 1984 and still played the Spreckels Organ occasionally. Stafford got to sit next to Jacobsen at the Chautauqua organ bench and learn from him until Jacobsen’s death left the gig open and Stafford was hired as Jacobsen’s replacement in 2020. Appa...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night PBS telecast the 45th annual A Capitol Fourth concert from the Capitol Mall at Washington, D.C., and it was actually more fun than usual. The show started with Lauren Daigle, one of the better “baby divas” cluttering up the modern music scene, singing “America, the Beautiful” and Yolanda Adams churning out a powerful version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then there was a four-song set by The Temptations, the current lineup with one surviving member (Otis Williams) from the original group. Williams, at least according to Wikipedia, owns the name “The Temptations,” and the rest of them are whoever he says they are. The songs they played last night were “Get Ready” and “My Girl,” and the current lead singer on “My Girl” (probably Tony Grant) is a quite good soul belter but doesn’t have the plaintive, understated quality the late David Ruffin brought to the original recording in 1964. Then...