Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, November 15) I watched a rather odd show on KPBS called A Salute to Vienna , which is apparently a revue-type show that has been touring the world for 25 years even though I’d never heard of it before. I’d seen the promos for it on KPBS previously and it seemed mildly interesting, and since there was nothing else on I wanted to watch (Lifetime is showing Terry McMillan-produced romantic dramas and Turner Classic Movies was running an absolute masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film noir High and Low – recently remade by Spike Lee – but my husband Charles was scheduled for a 1 to 10 p.m. shift, he’d be getting home in the middle of it, so instead of watching it last night I chose to order the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray so he and I can watch it together) I decided to take my chances with it. It became clear early on that this show’s “salute to Vienna” wouldn’t be about the tr...

The Legendary August 30, 1972 One-to-One Concerts Finally Get Their Just Due on CD – Sort Of by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order." – Adolf Hitler, Hamburg, Germany, 1932; quoted by Yoko Ono, One-to-One Concerts, New York City, August 30, 1972 On August 30, 1972, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the New York-based Left-wing political band Elephant’s Memory gave two concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. These were the only full-scale concerts Lennon ever gave between the breakup of The Beatles in April 1970 and his murder in December 1980. Ironically, Lennon had actually b...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I went to an unusual concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The original plan had been to have San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez play with the Navy and Marine Bands, but Raúl got called away to play a concert in Palm Desert and the military bands were unavailable due to the seemingly endless government shutdown. (Donald Trump gave an interview to 60 Minutes last night in which he made it clear that his price for ending the shutdown is total capitulation by the Democratic Party. No surprise there.) So Russ Peck was called in to throw together a program for the U.S. Navy’s “Fleet Week,” and naturally he relied on patriotic material as well as some of the medleys he’d played at his last Organ Pavilion appearance, when he performed on the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” August 25, where he played live behind three Laurel and...