Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After watching the film noir Moonrise on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, June 26, I waited almost an hour during which my husband Charles came home from work and I put on a PBS music show called Live from the Artists’ Den featuring singer-songwriter Patty Griffin. The show was copyrighted 2007 even though the series didn’t start airing on PBS stations until the following year. Griffin liked the show enough that she released it as a live CD in 2008, and it was quite impressive even though I tend to get Patty Griffin confused with the more country-style artist Kathy Griffin. Patty Griffin is a highly talented singer-songwriter who’s flirted with a wide range of styles, from traditional gospel to “Americana” to the kind of women’s folk music exemplified in the 1970’s by the late Laura Nyro and the still-living Carole King. Since Live from the Artists’ Den, unlike Live at the Belly Up or The Kate...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This afternoon (Sunday, June 21) at their regular 2 p.m. Sunday concert the Spreckels Organ Society featured a guest organist, David Marsh, who’s also a piano player and bills himself as a jazz musician as well as a theatre organist. His program promised “Popular Music from the Great American Songbook,” which made me think he was going to play exclusively songs from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. He did some of that material but he also played newer songs; he opened with “That’s Entertainment!,” composed by Arthur Schwartz with lyrics by Howard Dietz for interpolation into the 1953 musical film The Band Wagon . (The movie was nominally based on a 1930 revue by Schwartz and Dietz, but the 1953 film added a backstage-musical plot and had little in common with the stage version except a few of the songs and the male lead, Fred Astaire.) Then he played more recent songs from Disney films: Alan Menken...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Sunday, June 14) I wanted to go to the San Diego Organ Pavilion to hear the weekly Sunday afternoon concert, which as things turned out was unexpectedly interesting. First, the main organist was Alison Luedecke instead of Raúl Prieto Ramírez (a capable musician but one with an incredibly annoying stage presence). Second, it was one of the concerts designed to showcase up-and-coming organists still in their teens or even younger: nine-year-old Misaki Enomoto, 15-year-old Elle Lester, 15-year-old Elijah “Eli” Prada, and 16-year-old Aska Enomoto. All the young players are students of local organ teacher Leslie Wolf Robb, who was there to introduce them. Misaki Enomoto played two brief pieces, “Toccatina” by David Schack (b. 1947) and “The Chase” by John G. Barr (1938-2024). The others each played one piece by Johann Sebastian Bach and one piece by a more recent composer. Elle Lester’s Bach ...