ON the Beat | Tale of Two Societies

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on May 9, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Regardless of demographic or stylistic overlap, two of Santa Barbara’s more respected and historically deep dish music organizations — the Santa Barbara Blues Society (SBBS) and the Santa Barbara Choral Society (SBCS) — are seizing the spotlight on this weekend’s live music calendar. For those keeping score, the Blues Society recently celebrated its 47th anniversary and proudly owns rights as the longest-running blues society in America. Across genre town, the Choral Society celebrated its milestone 75th anniversary last year.
        
Catch blues/R&B powerhouse Nikki Hill at the SBBS show on Saturday night, at the Carrillo Recreation Center. The SBCS presents its season finale on Sunday afternoon at Trinity Lutheran Church.

Choral music and blues culture. On the town. Choose your Society, or better yet, choose both.

Down, Dirty, and Clean-Burning

In March, the SBBS’s last concert, a birthday celebration, went south but not out. Featured artist Chris Cain was a no-show, but the show reportedly went on, fueled by alternative back-up power sources. As a good blues show will.

Hill, hailing from Memphis by way of her native North Carolina, is a rising star who promises to get the Rec Center’s famed spring-loaded dance floor shaking for all it’s worth. As heard on her openly retro-fitted and ear-grabbing albums Feline Roots (2018) and Heavy Heart Hard Fists (2015) (check the Spotify link), Hill is less a down-the-middle blues artist than a potent force and voice in the between-zone where old school rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, gospel, and blues roots meet.

In her raucous, punchy, and soul-infused tracks, we get echoes of Tina Turner and Bettye Lavette and hints of the Rolling Stones (which has wisely called on both of those iconic artists as concert openers — Lavette on the current Stones tour). Hill’s feisty and tight touring band is fortified by a two-guitar line-up with Matt Hill and Laura Chavez — the first woman to grab the prestigious prize of the Blues Foundation’s Guitarist of the Year, in 2023.

Rolling Stone opined, “Nikki Hill is a revelation, her band masters of rocket-fueled bluesy swing, her voice the beacon which calls you home … a vocal powerhouse who don’t mess around.” True, that.

Choral Voices on High

After a dance-fired Saturday night soirée, head over to the church of choral music on Sunday afternoon. To close its current season, the SBCS offers up a program called “Visionaries Then & Now,” with the centerpiece of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem making a rare local appearance. Reputedly written for his late parents and finished in 1900, the Requiem was described by the thusly by the French composer: “Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.”

Sunday’s SBCS program, led by the ensemble’s longtime director JoAnne Wasserman, also zooms up to the present, with Ola Gjello’s “Dark Night of the Soul,” as well as Christopher Tin’s retooled arrangements of African songs. Featured soloists include baritone Michal Dawson Connor, soprano Elissa Johnston, and musical theater/jazz singer Jimmer Bolden in the choral mix.

Incidental note: the centennial of Fauré’s death in 1924 will be commemorated locally when the Music Academy features his music in this summer’s festival, in the special Hahn Hall program “The Faure Project,” on July 5, featuring violinist Joshua Bell, pianist Jeremy Denk, cellist Steven Isserlis, and violist Richard O’Neill.

Piano Highs, Continued

In a season which has been blessed with impressive classical piano recitals — the likes of Stephen Hough, Daniil Trifonov, and Hélène Grimaud — another bold recital evening snuck into the calendar, slightly under the radar. World-renowned pianist and veteran UCSB faculty member Paul Berkowitz settled into Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall in April for a rich program, once again pleading the case for Francis Poulenc, and prevailing.

As outer bookends, the pianist opened with Haydn and gave the second half to Schumann’s Humoreske, but Poulenc was clearly the main attraction. The pianist is reportedly working on a Poulenc CD, something to look forward to.
        
Just as Berkowitz lavished us with a rapturous reading of seldom-programmed improvisations by Poulenc in 2021, the entrancing French composer, member of “Les Six,” was the focus of Berkowitz’ latest performance. The myriad Poulenc miniatures heard here, including his Three Novelettes for piano, Three Intermezzi for piano, Thème varié, FP 151 from 1951, emerged as tiny jewels, duly polished, and with wit intact, by Berkowitz. The pianist remains a local treasure, semi-hiding in plain sight.
        
In a bit of timely peripheral data, Berkowitz is also noted as a mentor — during his time teaching at London’s Guildhall School of Music — of prominent composer Thomas Adès. Adès dazzled (and hypnotized) Campbell Hell audiences last month when the Danish String Quartet gave the U.S. Premiere of Adès’ Wreath – for Franz Schubert.

To-Doings:

Legendary folk-pop artist Judy Collins pays a return to an ideal venue, the Lobero Theatre, on Monday, May 13. Collins is a prime example of the annals of singers known for interpreting the songs of others, including Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Stephen Sondheim, whose “Send in the Clowns” took on new extra-musical theater meaning in Collins’s classic 1975 version.
        
The always warmly enjoyable Folk Orchestra of Santa Barbara makes its way back into Santa Barbara County venues this weekend, closing out its current season with a greatest hits package from its eight year (and counting) history, dubbed “Favorites!” (see story here).