Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I was looking for a relatively light movie that my husband Charles and I could watch to get our minds off the dreadful political news surrounding the 2022 midterm elections and preferably one with a Hallowe’en theme. I found it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 film of Richard O’Brien’s musical The Rocky Horror Show, a Queer-themed spoof of Frankenstein that premiered in London in 1973 and then played Broadway before 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights. They assigned it to director Jim Sharman and told him to recruit a cast of major American rock-music stars for the roles, but Sharman insisted that at least for the (more or less) British principals he wanted to use the players from the British stage version: Tim Curry as mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter (well, it’s a better name for a Frankenstein spoof than “Frankenweenie”!, Richard O’Brien himself as his servant Riff Raff (who a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting YouTube video from a man named Elam Rotem who runs a Web site called Early Music Sources. He sounds hike one of those guys I usually can’t stand – one of those “historically informed performance” fanatics who insist on doing research to go back to the way pre-Romantic music was presumably played when it was written by making mountains out of historical molehills – but this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPW9ENtNKA , proved unexpectedly interesting because its subject was historical recordings. Beginning in the late 19th century and through the 20th,we had major composers actually making recordings of their own music, and he played a snippet of a brief piano recording by Edvard Grieg of one of his minor piano pieces, then compared it to a modern recording of the same piece. He also played a recording of the opening of...

br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a “Snappy Video” Blu-Ray disc containing a compilation of “Soundies,” the three-minute music videos shot between 1941 and 1947 to be played on a “Panoram.” The Panoram was a sort if self-contained movie projector and screen, and if you put a dime into it (twice the going rate for an audio-only jukebox in the early- to mid-1940’s) you saw and heard a shirt filmclip of a big band, a country outfit, a vocal group or some other sort of audio-visual entertainment. The Snappy Video compilation featured 20 short films, though three weren’t Soundies; one was a band short with Ted Lewis and His Orchestra playing a 10-minute program. I suspect the folks at Universal (the opening logo said “Castle Films,” which in addition to being a logo used for educational films shown in schools was also an imprint Universal used to sell three-minute bits of their featu...

br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Since the Snappy Video “Soundies” collection ran only about an hour, I followed it up with a collection of music videos by Duke Ellington from an odd compilation called The Centennial Collection, released by RCA Victor in 1999. The company decided to commemorate its 100th anniversary in business by releasing a series of discs, each by one of their most famous artists, with a CD on one side of the dual cover and a DVD on the other. The Ellington DVD consisted of the 1935 Paramount short Symphony in Black, a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, five Ellington Soundies shot in Los Angeles in 1941, and a 1945 band short featuring Ellington’s band as it existed then. On oen of the two nights during which Turner Classic Movies featured Soundies, co-host Susan Delson noted that Ellignton’s Soundies seemed more interesting visually than others’ did. I’ve long thought that about Elli...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Monday, September 5 was the eleventh and last concert in the 2022 Spreckels Organ Soeiety’s Summer Organ Festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. It was billed as a tribute to “Women in Rock,” though their definition of “rock” was pretty elastic – it included a Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell duet, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, and two songs from Aretha Franklin, who was generally considered soul rather than rock (though Aretha’s talent was so protean it transcended genres and became what Duke Ellington called “beyond category”). The program consisted of 19 songs, all performed in one 90-minute set with no intermission (which surprised me a bit because I started to worry about the strain the band members, particularly lead singers Lauren Leigh Martin and Chloe Lou, were putting on their voices without a chance to rest them), and the opener wsas “Highway to Hell,” originally performed by the all-m...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved August 29 was the “Silent Movie Night” at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, and my husband Charles and I made it a point of getting there early so we could stake out good seats and be able to see the films effectively without too many people in our way. We were also worried that the Spreckels Organ Society had announced that they were blocking off the primo seats for people attending the beer and wine tasting event at 5:30 p.m. (Charles said that if I were interested in beer or wine he might have wanted us to go, even at a cost of $60 per person – at least it’s a benefit for the Spreckels Organ Society, a cause we support – but since I don’t drink alcohol and they weren’t serving a full meal, just hors d’oeuvre , there wasn’t much point in me going.) Charles wanted to block off some seats for friends of ours, and though I was a bit anxious about that, the people he had invited all showed up. Like a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s ninth in this year’s series of 11 Monday night concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion featured an ensemble called “Duo MusArt,” which is simply San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez (whose stage personality annoys me no end) and his wife, pianist María Teresa Sierra. The fact that Raúl, who comes off in person like a total screaming queen, is actually married to a woman is perhaps the most surprising thing about this duo. They first played together at the Organ Pavilion in 2018, the first summer season since Raúl was hired as civic organist, and they’ve troed to do it several times since without success. They scheduled it for 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic hit (I’ll never forget the opening months of the lockdown, in which all of Balboa Park was literally sealed off with crime-scene tape. They tried again in 2021 during the late season (September and October instead of July and...