On the fun-loving face of it, last Friday’s four-hour/four-act Santa Barbara Bowl concert, with Trombone Shorty as headliner, offered heaping portions of the emotional quality promised by opener Mavis Staples: “positive vibrations.” Timing was in its favor. Despite the lack of cultural links to anything Old Spanish Days-related, the escapist Fiesta spirit was humming on the Bowl’s hillside perch.
On a deeper and more musical and stylistic level, the evening amounted to an inadvertent revue-style show with embedded history and regional lessons attached, on the thematic turf of American musical roots and shoots.
Shorty himself is steeped in culture from his hometown of New Orleans, as he bridges traditional Crescent City music with his latter-day stylings. Pedal steel-mastering dynamo Robert Randolph, heir to the great, underrated “sacred steel” world, opened the evening with a powerful gospel-meets-Hendrix gusto. The theme of gospel as the seedbed of much American music continued with the great octogenarian gospel queen Staples, who closed her scene-stealing set with a fifty-plus year-old classic, “I’ll Take You There.” As a solo artist and member of the Staple Singers, Mavis reminded us that “we’ve been taking you there for 75 years.” True, that.
And yes, it’s also true that Ziggy Marley’s base takes us down to Jamaica, but reggae has been thoroughly embraced and embedded in American music, as witnessed by this week’s two-night Bowl stand with pop-reggae staples Rebelution and Iration (with Isla Vistan origin stories, to boot).
Marley, the celebrated son of reggae deity Bob Marley, assuredly took the stage with his tight band, taking some creative detours away from standard reggae moves and cliches. A lithe and dancing presence onstage, Marley synced snugly with his background singers, covering such classics as “Personal Revolution” and “Circle of Peace.” A more lineage-tending pinnacle of the set came with his personalized arrangements of the Bob Marley anthems “Is this Love” and “Get Up Stand Up,” which his father performed in a concert on this very stage in 1979, immortalized on a live album and video document. The Marley name and the Bowl are timelessly intertwined.
Shorty, whose broad fanbase has long included Santa Barbarans in its massive mix, delivered what we expect of him and his hot band, namely a tautly-machined expression of N’Awlins culture, but through a funked-up modern filter. Front and center, Trombone (and trumpet) Shorty, aka Troy Andrews, steered his ace seven-piece band through a festive-funky hour of power.
Ironically, the set’s opening sequence — nodding to the ominous introduction of 2001: A Space Odyssey with its use of Strauss’ landmark Also sprach Zarathustra — has accidentally turned into a nod to the summer cultural phenom that is Barbie, which also used the prelude ploy. Shorty channeled his unstoppable energy and “positive vibrations” into a potent show full of “riff swapping” with his nimble bandmates and a stroll around the Bowl’s aisles while in trombone-ly motion.
Though not much of a singer — he wisely relied on his backup singers to inject fire into such tunes as Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” — his magnetic charisma makes up for any weaker aspects of his work. He closed the official set with the ecstatic new-ish tune “Lifted” and imparted a stylistic link back to the awakening gospel spirit of Randolph and Staples.
If Shorty has a shortcoming, it may be that his bold command of his instruments suggests that he would benefit from more complex musical contexts — jazz chord changes, for instance. But for now, he’s the king of a lucrative feelgood party of his own devising, and we are willing party participants, especially on a lovely August night at the Bowl.
