ON the Beat | Cat Power-Powered Dylan

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on February 29, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

When last we caught Cat Power in 2022 at the Lobero, an ideal room for her special enigmatic charms, the unique artist born as Chan Marshall summoned up her signature moody mystique in the semi-dark. She slithered around the stage in a restless, cat-like style and wielded two microphones for timbre-shifting effect. The setlist touched on Cat Power classics but also tapped her then-recent Covers album, lending her voice and vibe to songs by a variety of artists including The Stones (the personally fitting “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”), The Pogues, Frank Ocean, and closing with Johnny Mathis (“Wild is the Wind”).

As much as her original music has its own particular expressive mojo, Cat Power possesses an inspired way with cover songs. She’s up to those interpretive tricks in a highly focused way on her latest project with the wordy but self-descriptive title, Cat Power Sings Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, the basis of the current tour bringing her back to the Lobero on Wednesday, March 6.

The characteristic rough edges, unpredictable twists, and low range of Marshall’s voice beautifully suits the famed Dylan show of old, airlifting that moment in musical history into a kind of time-freezing and revitalizing relevance. She also heeds the historical zeitgeist of the concert’s significance, switching from acoustic folky to electric folk-rock mode — to the disapproval of his early folk purist fans.

But Dylan was never one to be boxed in by his own reputation or audience expectations. Ditto, Cat Power. Any chance to catch her live is one to be savored.

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More CAT Powers

Coincidentally, another hot ticket item on next week’s music calendar, also in the cozy confines of the Lobero Theatre on Thursday, March 7, goes by another feline nom de plume, Meow Meow. The Australian performer Melissa Madden Gray, thegifted and sly neo-cabaret artistknown as Meow Meow, has become a distinctive and critically acclaimed re-inventor of cabaret music, with tongue-in-cheek and cultural histories in mind.

With her current project, headed to the Lobero courtesy of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures, much can be gleaned from another wordy but apt concert title, Sequins and Satire, Divas and Disruptors: The Wild Women of the Weimar Republic. If we reflexively think of the Weimar Republic space-time, in Germany during the 1920s, as the heyday of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (and as recently flown back into the public forum via TV’s Babylon Berlin), there is more to the story and household names. Expect an education when Meow Meow hits the stage.

Meow Meow, who has worked in many contexts and glowing reviews in the New Yorker and many other publications that matter, has also found a natural alliance with the Portland, Oregonian kitsch dispensary Pink Martini and leader Thomas Lauderdale.        

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Serious Music at a Church Luncheon

Two weeks back, I was on duty to review a fascinating concert by eminent and often contemporary music-specializing Los Angeleno pianist Vicki Ray, as part of the long-standing “Piano Spheres” series she helped to launch. Her program, “Nacht und Träume,” at the hip black box and hip hangout L.A. venue 2200 Art + Archives, created a mesmerizing thematic web of music based on night and dreams, spinning off of Schubert’s title art song and featuring living composers and a centerpiece of John Cage’s pivotal prepared piano work from 1944, The Perilous Night.
        
Ray may be associated with modern manners and matters, having also taught for years at CalArts, worked with the EAR Unit and many other contemporary associations, but is also a well-rounded classical pianist. Santa Barbara gets a lunch-timed taste of the “other” side of her musical being on Monday, March 4, when the Trinity Episcopal Church’s “Noon Concerts” (actually, 12:15-12:45 p.m.) features the pianist along with violinist Alyssa Park and cellist Evgeny Tonkha. The subject: Maurice Ravel’s 1914 Piano Trio in A minor.
        
The Episcopal church, a Historic Landmark in all its Gothic Revival splendor, has long been a jewel of a space for live music performance. Among my own memories in this space was an environmental-themed spatial work by the late, great Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Henry Brant, and various organ recitals (Some of us long for the revival of organ recitals here, the home of Santa Barbara’s finest pipe organ. But we digress).
        
Next in the Noon Concert’s series is a period-sensitive Handel-based performance on Friday, May 17, with soprano Melissa Givens, baroque oboist Stephen Hammer, baroque bassoonist Kennth Munday, and Thomas Joyce — the church’s ever-impressive organist — on harpsichord.