Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 11) my husband Charles and I attended the sixth of nine concerts in the Summer Organ Festival Monday nights in Balboa Park until September 1, when they plan to close out the season with a Beatles tribute. (So far they’ve done The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and an all-around tribute to women in rock which omitted all too many important women rockers, like Suzi Quatro, Pat Benatar, Chrissie Hynde, and Patti Smith, to concentrate way too much on the band Heart; when , I keep wondering, are they going to do Queen, especially since one of civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez’s best selections is his stunning solo organ transcription of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?) The featured organist last night was Chelsea Chen, whom I feel like we’ve grown up with – which we have. She made her Spreckels Organ debut in 2000 when she was still in high school, and now she’s in her early 40’s a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday, August 6) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring a group called the Rockin’ Jazz Big Band, whose name alone was irresistible to me. They turned out to be a full-sized big band with the classic swing-era lineup – four trumpets, three trombones, five saxes, piano, guitar, bass, and drums – playing a mixed repertoire that drew on 1950’s and 1960’s big-band songs along with modern rock and pop tunes done up in swing style. The program opened with Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova,” which he originally wrote in 1962 for one of his big-band albums on Mercury (with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, of all people, as the flute soloist!) but which got recycled by Mike Myers for the Austin Powers movies, which spoofed the James Bond mythos . Then their female singer, Vanessa Costana (I’m guessing at the spelling of the name because the band’s leader, drummer Bill Dutton, bar...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 14) my husband Charles and I returned to the Monday evening summer organ concerts in Balboa Park after missing last Monday’s with organist Ahreum Han because we were out of town. (At least two of our long-time friends there last night told us it was a great concert.) Last night we had to suffer through the typical egomania of San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who was giving the concert himself as accompanist for a quite accomplished soprano named Alisa Jordheim. Her program was evenly divided between opera arias, Lieder, and selections from the “Great American Songbook” from Broadway and Hollywood in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. The program began with Raúl playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532. After he was done with the piece he made a slighting comment to the effect that he’d crossed off Bach from the list of things he had to ...