Tag archives: music
Montecito music man Peter Clark has retired as president of the 23-year-old Santa Barbara Jazz Society to be replaced by local artist Natalie Wilson. Peter, 80, was accompanied by his glamorous wife, Gloria, when he made the announcement to 200 club members at SOhO, where the group holds its monthly concerts, with the Los Angeles-based […]
Mysticism is made manifest via the spiritually inspired saxophone played by Charles Lloyd, the jazz artist whose career began in Memphis in the 1950s, found stardom in the 1960s (when his Forest Flower was the first-ever million-selling jazz album), became an inner-seeking Big Sur recluse in the ’70s and resurrected himself in the ’90s as […]
Jazz. In a decade of electronic desktop computer music and musically void cover bands, we find a new local straight no chaser band, the SB Jazz Collective [SBJZ], designed by millennial and UCSB grad Andrew Williams. To get a taste of this ear candy, head over to their next gig at SOhO nightclub on Tuesday, […]
Until less than a year ago, Karen Yeh was simply a musician. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the cellist wanted something more. A native of Long Island, Yeh began studying piano at 6 and took up the cello three years later. She attended the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook’s […]
In an impromptu gig at Roy’s Restaurant on August 16, locals were treated to the music of upcoming Generation-Y songstress Carly Jo Jackson, who was in town to begin recording her first LP with music guru producer and par-none sound master Chris Pelonis [Jeff Bridges], at his studios, Lost Coast Records. The album’s release date […]
The Music Academy of the West gave its 2018 Summer Festival Gala weaving its magic to turn a parking lot into an elegant, glamorous venue. Co-chairs Regina Roney and Judy Getto called it a “Feast for the Senses”. After cocktails in the garden with a white Steinway player piano tinkling away, guests made their way […]
It couldn’t have been a more splendiferous end to the Music Academy of the West’s 71st annual summer fest when the Academy Festival Orchestra, under Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, in his academy debut, performed with the L.A. Master Chorale, under artistic director Grant Gershon, at a sold-out Santa Barbara Bowl. Soprano Susanna Phillips […]
Like just about every other community across the nation and around the world, Santa Barbara had to wait 40 years to see the singer-songwriter Rodriguez perform in concert in town – something they didn’t even realize they were missing until the movie Searching for Sugar Man appeared five years ago – when he performed at […]
Normally, classical musicians who end up collaborating might meet in a conservatory or perhaps sharing a seminar or the stage at a summer program. Maybe they’re introduced by colleagues or are drawn in by listening to each other’s recording. Not so much with SB native flamenco-influenced guitarist Chris Fossek and Paul Merkelo, the principal trumpet […]
The Squire Foundation’s second mini-partnership residency this summer 2018 is Chicago-based music composer and conductor Jim Stephenson. He is working in partnership with Ben Halpern, Ph.D.,UCSB marine scientistand executive director of the UCSB National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and the Music Academy of the West (MAW) Montecito. Stephenson will be composing a […]
The Music Academy of the West’s 71st annual summer music festival is drawing to a close, with the Lobero and Hahn Hall hosting two well-attended concerts. The Festival Artists Series program featured Janacek’s Mladi, wrapping with Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence with Edward Dusinberre and Harumi Rhodes on violin, Geraldine Walther and Karen Dreyfus on viola, […]
On the Verge (OTV), Santa Barbara native Kate Bergstrom‘s repertory theatre company founded in 2015 with a mission of marrying new work created by female and LGBTQ writers with the local community of actors, directors, producers, and theater-goers, is taking a slight detour for its fourth year. In place of presenting several different plays in […]
Like most of the vocal Fellows at the Music Academy of the West (MAW), Benjamin Dickerson has an affinity both for art song and opera. But Dickerson has already reached the top tier in both endeavors at the Montecito summer festival. Dickerson claimed the coveted Marilyn Horne Song Competition in his only other summer in […]
Rocker Alan Parsons was making waves, sound waves at a boffo bash at his rustic aerie in the Goleta foothills, when he celebrated the completion of his new multi-million-dollar recording studio, wittily dubbed ParSonics. Alan, 69, who worked with The Beatles and Pink Floyd, to name a few supergroups, and set up the Alan Parsons […]
The Music Academy of the West’s (MAW) annual gala benefit concert is anchored by a quintet of distinguished alumni artists. Among the former Fellows performing at this year’s special fundraiser are soprano Brenda Rae (2008), whom Opera News has praised for her “dazzling, pinpoint coloratura,” and bass-baritone Brandon Cedel (2010-11), whom The New Yorker‘s Alex […]
Louise Goffin, daughter of the iconic songwriting duo Carole King and Gerry Goffin, has long been a singer-songwriter and producer on her own, dating back to Kid Blue,her debut album more than 40 years ago. Her style has always drawn from both her parents’ pop sensibilities, her mom’s piano-based melody-driven music, and the folk-rock of […]
Although the American composer Elizabeth Ogonek won’t turn 30 until next May, she’s already earned a great deal of attention and acclaim for her ever-expanding body of work that has included commissions from the London and Chicago Symphony orchestras as well as smaller ensembles and chamber pieces. Her music is markedly colorful and dramatic, with […]
Don’t talk to Peter Case about craft. The veteran singer-songwriter who started life as a power pop/punk rocker in such bands as The Plimsouls and The Nerves back in the 1970s and ’80s finds hearing that people love his “well-crafted songs” something close to an insult as it undercuts the artistry. Which seems reasonable, since […]
A mother-daughter collaboration that started 10 years ago has just come to fruition. Montecito resident Helen Drachkovitch and her cultural anthropologist daughter, Nicole Sault, who lives in Palo Alto, have just published Celebramos/Let’s Celebrate: Seis Traditions de Mexico/ Six Traditions From Mexico, a bilingual work. “It all started a decade ago when my mother became […]
The Hotel Californian was the site for the inaugural annual Santa Barbara hotel Olympics featuring a host of events including a bell cart race, culinary palate test, bike building, towel origami, and even cake wars. “After the terrible time we had at the start of the year with the devastating mudslides, we thought we needed […]
