David Marsh Plays Charming "Great American Songbook" Program at Organ Pavilion June 21

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’s and Howard Ashman’s “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid and Randy Newman’s “When She Loved Me” from the first Toy Story. After that he played Zequinha de Abreu’s novelty hit “Tico Tico” (with two exceptions Marsh claimed he was playing his own arrangements but this one sounded awfully like the one Ethel Smith had a hit on in the 1940’s) and a genuine Great American Songbook standard: George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” from the 1930 musical Girl Crazy. After that Marsh played Milton Delugg’s and Willie Stein’s 1950 song “Orange-Colored Sky,” which I first heard on Natalie Cole’s tribute album to her father, Unforgettable … With Love. Then I heard Nat “King” Cole’s version with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, and I loved it even though Kenton’s arrangement was so loud and brassy Cole joked at the end, “I thought love was quieter than this.” (When I first heard that record I joked back, “Of course you did! Your wife had sung with Duke Ellington!”) After that Marsh played a genuine 1920’s song, Vincent Youmans’s and Irving Caesar’s “Tea for Two,” originally written for the musical No, No, Nanette but dropped from the final version.

Next was another Schwartz/Dietz song, “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” after which Marsh jumped the decades again and played “Let It Go” by Robert and Kristen Anderson Lopez from the movie Frozen. Then he played a bit of “Texas Fight,” the University of Texas’s football fight song, attributed online to Col. Walter S. Hunnicutt and James E. King. After that Marsh played “Misty,” originally a jazz instrumental by pianist Erroll Garner and later turned into a pop song by lyricist Johnny Burke and recorded gloriously by Sarah Vaughan (who understood the modern-jazz world Garner came from) and god-awfully by Johnny Mathis (who didn’t). Marsh’s next number he announced as something he’d just published called “Java,” which made it seem like an original but it was actually the early-1960’s hit by a Black New Orleanian credited as “A. Tousan” but who was really veteran composer, arranger, producer, and bandleader Allen Toussaint. Then Marsh played a couple of novelties, a song called “Hot Dog” whose arrangement he attributed to theatre organist George Wright, though the actual composer appears to have been Sidney Torch; and “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands,” which Wikipedia lists as “traditional” even though Sesame Street composer Joe Raposo asserted a copyright on it. Next up was a classical medley consisting of the two most famous organ pieces ever written, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, and Charles-Marie Widor’s final “Toccata” from his Organ Symphony No. 5, followed by two other pieces I didn’t recognize. Marsh closed with “California, Here I Come,” written by Joseph Meyer and Buddy DeSylva with a cut-in credit to Al Jolson for interpolation in Jolson’s 1920’s musical Bombo. I was a bit surprised he didn’t play the usually obligatory “The Star-Spangled Banner” either at the start or the end, but I liked Marsh’s stage manner. He made a lot of lame jokes but also made fun of himself for the jokes being lame and said it was the audience’s duty to laugh at them anyway (a far cry from San Diego’s usual civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who’s a capable musician but a decidedly annoying and unfunny stage personality). Marsh also comes off as such a screaming queen it was a real surprise when he introduced a woman in the front row as his wife (or at least his partner) Betsy, but then again there are two San Diego-based organists who likewise projected such Gay public personae it shocked me when they turned out to be married to women.