ON the Beat | MAW on the Go, CAMA On the Horizon

---

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on July 18, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

---

Academy Update

Following a one-two punch of major events on last weekend’s Music Academy of the West (MAW) calendar — between a stellar production of Carmen as this season’s opera of choice and a special piano performance by Timo Andres and Conor Hannick of Philip Glass’s complete piano etudes (see review here), the concert portion of the MAW calendar takes a bit of a breather in the next week.

Three noteworthy performances are on the books. Famed tenor Lawrence Brownlee gives us a recital at Hahn Hall on Tuesday, July 23, with voice department co-head John Churchwell in accompaniment. Ravel’s pocket-sized one-act opera L’Enfant Sortilèges (The Child and his Enchanted Room) lands at Hahn Hall on Thursday, July 25.

Then fans of contemporary music of a high order will want to swing by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on Saturday at 3 p.m., when the inspiring young composer Gabriella Smith’s entrancing Carrot Revolution will be performed by the MAW-rooted Arancia Quartet violinists Miyabi Henriksen and Steven Song, violist Sheng-Chieh Jason Lan, and cellist Shijie Ma. (Smith’s orchestral piece Lost Coast: Concerto for Cello and Orchestra shook and massaged The Granada Theatre in 2023, as premiered by the Gustavo Dudamel–led L.A. Philharmonic.)

Otherwise, Music Academy diehards will have ample opportunity to soak up a steady diet of master classes and other extra-concert action, including the weekly Fellow Fridays Series, in which fellows are given the key to the asylum and to programming planning for a night each week. Good and serious fun can be expected, along with pre-show picnicking options.

---

CAMA Coming Attractions

Speaking of the venturesome 2023 L.A. Phil concert at the Granada, that event came courtesy of Santa Barbara’s much-cherished CAMA organization, which has ushered countless international orchestras and classical artists through our fair city for 105 years and counting. As much as classical heads are currently aswim in MAW matters, through the Academy’s August 3 closing concert, the prospects of another strong season of serious music, from CAMA and other sources, is sneaking into consciousness and calendar-marking rituals.

In fact, one of the highlights of the upcoming 106th concert season, dubbed Musical Bridges: Connecting Continents, Cultures, and Generations, is the annual visit from the L.A. Phil, this time led by dynamo maestro emeritus Esa-Pekka Salonen, with eminent pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Their May 9 program at the Granada goes all French, in the form of music by Debussy and Pierre Boulez, whose post-serial music is rarely heard in these parts or many other American parts. (Although Boulez was a three-time music director at the Ojai Music Festival, for the 805 record).

The L.A. Phil’s appearance caps off a five-concert orchestral series which also starts out of L.A. with the widely-respected Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on October 21. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra plays on November 12, the London Symphony Orchestra returns to town on February 18 (co-sponsored by the Music Academy of the West), and “Black or ethnically diverse” London-based Chineke! Orchestra brings its black composer–enriched program on April 3.

Meanwhile, the chamber music arm of CAMA, “Masteries” at the Lobero, includes major pianists Garrick Ohlsson (January 23) and Yefim Bronfman (April 9), violinist Anne Akiko Meyers (with pianist Fabio Bidini) and an irrepressibly likable violinist-fiddler close to Santa Barbara’s heart and history, Gilles Apap (March 8). Apap, former Santa Barbara Symphony concertmaster, longtime Arroyo Grande resident and globally embraced musician whose fans included Yehudi Menuhin, has been known to shake up the stuffed-shirted classical status quo with his genre-bouncing tendencies. But then he settles into Bach’s Prelude in D with a depth inspiring awe and a tear or three. Expect some awe, long with a sly, sideways grin.

Alejandro E Off the Walls of SOhO

Those who know and love him, well, know and love him. But how to describe just who Alejandro Escovedo is and where he fits into the pop-cultural scheme of things? Kinfolk to Pete Escovedo and Sheila E, he played with the punk band the Nuns and cowpunk band Rank and File (which played at the mythically cool Baudelaire’s in the ‘80s) and his considerable American cred landed him in the Peggie Jones–fueled “Sings like Hell” series at the Lobero. Whoever he is, the 73-year-old came out slamming with his potent four-piece band at SOhO last week, touching on various points of his circuitous route to the here and now — as he does on his revised retrospective new album Echo Dancing — and the effect was fairly riveting.

At one point, he said, “This next song is a great example of why you never hear my music on the radio.” One, two, three, four, enter the semi-Bowie-esque “Deerhead on the Wall.”

The show opened boldly, and leanly, with his guitarist James Mastro — once from the band Bongos — showing his considerable skill and wit as a singer-songwriter. All in all, a good, left-of-commercial-radio-play night was had by all.

---

To-Doings:

Call it jam-pop or whatever works for your sensibilities, but there is something special and gleefully category-hopping about the band we know as ALO (a k a Animal Liberation Orchestra), formed out of UCSB and now a worldly entity. On Wednesday, July 24, we can catch them as locally as the Lobero, where they’ll play a split bill with surf culture-nic Donavan Frankenreiter. ALO’s keyboardist Zach Gill, a proud Goletan, travels to outposts near and far as keyboard kindred soul in Jack Johnson’s band, while his mates — guitarist Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz (see Leslie Dinaberg’s interview with him here), and bassist Steve Adams hail from NorCal, occasionally meeting on the turf of their birth.

It’s always good news when former Santa Barbaran–turned New Yorker Nate Birkey heads back to town, right about now. There are extenuating circumstances having to do, tangentially, with Fiesta: it’s a fine time for him to head west and play with his old allies in Spencer the Gardener (long a Fiesta party pillar), but the trumpeter-vocalist also manages to show his artful jazz persona while in town. Birkey will perform with his quintet (pianist Jamieson Trotter, saxist Tom Buckner, bassist Gabe Davis, and drummer Peter Buck) on Tuesday, July 23 at SOhO (see Lauren Chiou’s story here).

Birkey, who recently scored the forthcoming indie film For Every Lonely Soul, boasts a discography of ten albums on the Household Ink Records label, the most recent being the standout Rome, recorded with Italian musicians. It’s about time for number 11, wethinks.