Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, January 30), after a dull and disappointing episode of the Caribbean-set policier Death in Paradise , my husband Charles and I watched an engaging set on the TV show The Kate featuring a three-person band called the Wood Brothers. The Kate is shot at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, and the Wood Brothers had an interesting backstory. Guitarist and lead singer Oliver Wood and bassist and harmonica player Chris Wood grew up together in Boulder, Colorado; their father, a molecular biologist by day and an amateur musician by night, was active in the 1960’s folk-music scene and music was very much a part of the family’s life. But when they grew up and moved out they separated and didn’t see each other for 15 years. Chris became a jazz bassist and co-founder of the band Medeski, Martin, and Wood, while Oliver hooked up with whi...

Young Black Orchestral Composers Featured in a Telecast That’s Not the Same-Old Same-Old by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After The Lemon Grove Incident on Monday, January 19, KPBS showed a year-old concert from Atlanta, Georgia held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had actually been pastor. Of course the current campus of Ebenezer Baptist is far newer, more modern, and more elaborate than the one at which Dr. King ministered! The concert was co-sponsored by Ebenezer Baptist and the Atlanta Symphony and took place on January 20, 2025 – ironically the day at which slimeball racist Donald J. Trump returned to the Presidency as well as the official date of the 2025 King Day holiday. The concert was led by a highly energetic Black conductor, Jonathan Taylor Rush, and began with an O.K. performance of the so-called “Negro National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the annual PBS telecast of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert – or at least the second half thereof, the only part PBS ever shows us. It was conducted by Yannet Nézet-Séguin, a Canadian conductor who in line with the common practice of today (former Fanfare contributor Roger Dettmer lamented in the 1980’s that “death has depleted the ranks of great conductors without life having replaced them in kind”) holds three, count ‘em, three major musical directorships: the Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montréal, Canada. (Dave Hurwitz has complained many times that the ranks of the world’s great conductors are being stretched so thin these days, with too few maestros chasing too many jobs.) He’s also 50 years old and is married to a man, Métropolitain Orchestra violinist Pierre ...