Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, August 27) I went to the next-to-last “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Pavilion featuring aspiring local rock star Matthew Phillips, who sings, plays guitar (mostly electric, though on one song he picked up an acoustic), and leads a power trio of bassist Reece Warren and drummer Corey Newton. Matthew Phillips had played “Twilight in the Park” on August 29, 2024, too – in fact, that year he closed the season – and in 2024 he drew a quite large crowd that seemed to inspire him. Phillips, taking advantage of the improvements in technology that allow musicians playing electric instruments to roam freely and not be tethered by cords connecting their instruments to their amplifiers, strode through the audience like a conquering hero while still playing and singing away. Alas, this year he had a much smaller audience (I was amazed at how many more peop...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday evening (Tuesday, August 26) I went to the Organ Pavilion again for the third-from-last 2025 “Twilight in the Park” concert, featuring the Coronado Concert Band. I mentioned this to my husband Charles when he returned from work and said, “The musicians were better than the material,” which pretty well sums it up. This was one group that presented a pre-printed program on green paper (though I didn’t get a copy, I saw other people in the audience with them). The concert was titled “From Hollywood to Broadway” – reversing the usual order of those communities – and it consisted mostly of suites from film scores. Four of the selections – The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 film, mostly Harold Arlen’s songs rather than Herbert Stothart’s background score), Titanic (heard here as part of a James Horner medley called “Hollywood Blockbusters”), Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi , and Mission: Impos...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 25) my husband Charles and I went with several friends to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” as part of the annual Monday nights’ summer organ festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We got there early enough to hear the organist, Russ Peck, rehearse his program of short selections before the movies (there were three, more on that later). I was amused that the first thing he played, both in rehearsal and in the actual concert (the normal routine is the organist plays a short pre-film recital of theatre-organ pieces, including arrangements of pop songs, while waiting for the sky to get dark enough to render the movie visible), was “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” The irony was that it was this song, probably more than any other, that killed the silent movie as an art form. In the 1927 film The Jazz Singer , Al Jolson sang the song “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” (one of his many batho...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Two nights ago (Thursday, August 21) I went to another “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Organ Pavilion to hear the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra. They’re a group that began as the Chula Vista Community Band in 1996 and has been together ever since. They’ve been pretty much a fixture at the Twilight in the Park concert series since 2005. Despite what you might think from a band that named itself after Glenn Miller’s theme song and starts their appearances with Benny Goodman’s, “Let’s Dance,” the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra is not just a tribute band to the swing era: they play a wide variety of material. I happened to re-read my 2024 review of the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra ( https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/08/moonlight-serenade-orchestra-plays.html ) and was a bit surprised that back then I actually liked their excursions into post-swing repertoire. This time around I just foun...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I went to Balboa Park again (Wednesday, August 20) for another “Twilight in the Park” concert, this one featuring The New Catillacs. I remember seeing the original Catillacs doing a brief concert on a patio in Seaport Village in the 1980’s; back then they were a three-piece group of guitar, keyboard, and bass. Alas, they just did 1950’s and early 1960’s songs and they used a drum machine in place of a human drummer, which seemed inappropriate for material that was first written and recorded before drum machines existed. I could understand why: the tiny size of that patio would have precluded someone actually setting up a drum set. The New Catillacs still use the original group’s logo – an anthropomorphized drawing of a cat wielding an electric guitar – but they now not only have a human drummer but a quite fine one. His name is Bruce Pictor, and he has apparently played with The Association (an ass...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, August 19) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring the Marcia Forman Band, of which I had vague memories from a previous year. Marcia herself is a middle-aged Jewish white woman who, praise be, brought along her husband, Floyd Fronius, who joined the group on jazz violin. Fronius usually plays with the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas, a sort of country-punk group which when they play at Twilight in the Park (they’re scheduled to close the current season on August 28) have to censor their name to Back Pocket Whiskey Fellas. But he fitted in beautifully with his wife’s jazz playing. Forman played mostly alto sax, though she switched to soprano on two songs, “Give It Up or Let Me Go” (a blues number written and recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1972 and also done by the Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks – oddly they got rid of the word “Dixie” but kept in the word “Chicks,” wh...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 18) my husband Charles and I went to the seventh of this year’s nine concerts in the Summer Organ Festival series in Balboa Park. This was the one featuring San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, along with a 38-piece symphony orchestra (all the players were listed in the program so I was able to count them) playing works for organ and orchestra by Francis Poulenc, Johann Sebastian Bach, Horatio Parker, and Raúl Prieto Ramírez himself. Raúl had given a similar concert at last year’s summer organ festival, but this time he had a new conductor (Arizona-based Alejandro Goméz-Guillén instead of San Diego-based Michael Gerdes) and, of the four pieces in his 2024 program, the Parker was the only one that was repeated. Instead of organ concerti in F by Handel and Haydn (I wondered in my review of the 2024 concert whether F was a particularly congenial key for the organ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, August 14) I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the latest “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring a local country-rock band called Matt Hill and the Black Spurs. Alas, I didn’t get the message that the concert was starting earlier than usual – at 6 p.m. instead of the 6:30 start time most of them have had this year – because, as it turned out, San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez needed the Organ Pavilion to rehearse his Monday night concert with a local pick-up symphony orchestra. I was especially ticked off at having missed the first song or two because what I did get to see and hear was easily the hottest Twilight in the Park concert I’ve been to this season. Matt Hill turned out to be an excellent singer and guitar player, throwing himself into the music with complete passion and abandon. He’s tall, with long, dark, curly hair, and his drumm...

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 ...