ON the Beat | Jazz on Tap, Inside and Out

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on September 12, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Jazz alert: by some cosmic serendipity, the Santa Barbara/Ventura zone has seen a bounty of notable jazz action this September, of both the inside and outside, mainstream and left-of-mainstream kind. A happy anomaly or a trend? I opt for the latter, but wariness remains in a local music scene not always welcoming of visitors from the greater jazz world.
        
When catching live music is a regular part of life, both as personal passion and professional duty, details and specific impressions can get blurry. But highlights have a way of rising above the fuzz and the fray. This year, amongst a couple of hundred shows deep so far, one clear personal epiphany came in the small, 500-year-old Marienkapelle church on the Rhine River early in July. A half-hour solo concert by legendary trumpeter/musician Peter Evans, part of the Monheim Trienniale festival, effectively rearranged mental molecules and seized the nano-moments of my consciousness. I approved. Mightily. And the memory lingers.

I had heard Evans on many records and once live, when he was with the wacky-brilliant Mostly Other People Do the Killing, but to soak in a solo show at close range was almost too much to handle. It was killing, in the best way.

What makes Evans particularly notable among a new crop of wide-scoped jazz musicians is his ever-evolving and innately changeable approach to the musical moment, in free improvisational mode, and a musicality-enriched virtuosity which can extend to the “non-jazz” orbits of early music and new music (he performed with ICE — International Contemporary Ensemble — at the Ojai Music Festival in 2015). At the church in Monheim, Evans traversed a world of fleeting yet strong ideas, coaxing extended techniques, unexpected sonic turns, and herculean circular breathing to create a vibrant tapestry of a statement, at once bold and nuanced.
        
A west coast tour with Evans’ fascinating group Being and Becoming — one of a few ongoing projects on his roster — included a date in Ojai’s Women’s Center on Thursday, filled in a calendar hole with a Santa Barbara stop. On Friday, September 13, Evans and band play in the much-cherished Piano Kitchen, and Evans will also stop by Santa Barbara City College for a clinic/performance in SBCC Music Department room 101, on Friday morning at 11 a.m., and it’s open to the public.

The band also features prominent young vibraphonist Joel Ross, last heard in Santa Barbara in Campbell Hall last spring as part of a gathering of artists on the Blue Note Records label. Needless to say, this Friday the 13th is a major moment for world class off-the-radar jazz in our humble town.

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Polished Pacific Swing Factory

Last Friday night, jazz of a straighter color — and high standards — landed at The Granada Theatre, with the welcome speedy return of the Chris Walden–directed Pacific Jazz Orchestra (PCO). The group made a bold impression at its April concert, part of the Granada’s grand centennial celebration, and with luck, will be a regularly programmed Granada staple.

The PCO is a unique organism and well-developed institution-in-the-making, drawing together some of the finest jazz musicians in Los Angeles (a k a finest in the world) to create a hybrid string orchestra and jazz big band. Walden’s grand design is a noble one, with the added bonus of appealing to both jazz nerds and music fans less plugged directly into jazz, per se, but with an ear for formidable talents in the guest vocalist spotlights of PCO’s concerts.

Friday’s vocal component featured a dazzling singer deserving greater recognition, Sy Smith, who delivered some powerful expressive goods on standards — “Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Teach me Tonight” — and a potent personalized version of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” with a mind-boggling vocal gymnastic mock-turntablist intro.

Among other things, PCO showcases some of the high-flying and part-nailing talent which tends to thrive in the studios for film music and all manner of projects, but don’t tend to get out much. The personnel list, scrolled on screen at concert’s end, drew gasps of recognition from those in the know, including trumpeter Wayne Bergeron and guitarist Dean Parks (of Steely Dan–session fame and much more). Of local note, the sax section featured the impressive Jacob Scesney, whose solo alongside Smith during “Feeling Good” was one of the best of the night, and who grew up in the Santa Barbara jazz education scene before gaining glowing employment down south with Stevie Wonder, countless pop, TV settings, the Grammy band, and more.

The other vocalist of the program, John Pizzarelli, is a friendly, serviceable singer, mostly in service of his stellar mainstream jazz guitar prowess — with some DNA bequeathal gained from his father Bucky Pizzarelli, no doubt. As he hit the stage following Smith, he jibed, “Could she have left me something? How can I follow Sy?” Pizzarelli moved with ease and humor on “Luck be a Lady,” “Avalon,” and rethunk Beatles’ “Honey Pie,” a la swing, was one of the cherries on top of another altogether engaging jazz-orchestral outing. Encore, please.

Hot Rock-Punk-Jazz Savories at the Deer Lodge Opry

A pleasant, and brainy and raucous, surprise on the 805 music calendar came with the arrival of the Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis, who stopped by Ojai’s Deer Lodge on Sunday night. The quartet, pumped up by Fugazi members Brendan Canty and Lally in the drums-bass foundation and the solid soloist/frontline department led by wily fine guitarist Anthony Pirog (who can sound like Vernon Reid in Ronald Shannon Jackson and The Decoding Society) and one of the most talked-about saxists in jazz of the moment, James Brandon Lewis, released an acclaimed album on the Impulse! Records this year. It’s the kind of in-your-face, rock-jazz merger that extends its allure to jazz heads and anyone with a sense of dance impulse and artful musical firepower.

The project, deftly stirring together elements of punk energy, funk groove twists, and jazz-infused harmonic/melodic lines, sprang to life with a special intensity in the revised roadhouse aura of Ojai’s Deer Lodge, with its cheeky sign “Deer Lodge Opry.”

The show opened with a half hour of amiable and atmosphere-stoking free improvisation by Ojai-based Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, with saxist Rob Magill, bassist Kyle Crane, and drummer Jesse Siebenberg.

Lewis has been working at his musical craft and aesthetic for years, but he is suddenly benefitting from a burst of deserved accolades in the jazz scene. To expand one’s awareness of his breadth, check out the varied directions on a range of recent releases, including on Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi’s reflective album on ECM, A New Day, Dave Douglas’ Gifts and Lewis’ own recent album — the glorious and radiant For Mahalia, with Love and Eye of I, not to mention adventurous albums on the Swiss Intakt label. You can also hear his band at the Monterey Jazz Festival in late September.

To hear him, very up close and explosive, in the rustic hothouse of the Deer Lodge is the musical experience of last week that most rises above and sticks to this busy listener’s memory.

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To-Doings:

Fans of country music that digs into its roots while reaching into the occasionally surreal byways of a singer-songwriter’s fervent imagination, get thee to hear Kentucky-born Sturgill Simpson at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Sunday night. (See story here).