ON the Beat | Willie, Presidential Wishful, Hits the Bowl

---

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on May 2, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

---

It’s safe to say that no show in this year’s Santa Barbara Bowl season will have had the aisle-crossing, trans-generational, catch-all demographic appeal than the night Willie returned to the big house at the corner of Anapamu and Milpas. That’s Willie Nelson, of course, one of America’s great cultural levelers and sages. Going strong and stretching time at age 90 (he turned 91 on Monday), the country legend got right to work, goosing the rhythms in a jazz-like way on his road-worn classical guitar and as a singer with an ever-assuring and unmistakable style and stamp.  

This was one of those Bowl nights where the opening act was of critical importance. Asleep at the Wheel, the timelessly hip neo-western swing band formed in 1970, lives up to only half of its band name — the wheels of a long road stretching back to 1970. They are anything but asleep, as witnessed via their potent set of mostly Texas-related and often Bob Wills–referential songs, with sax, steel, and fiddle in tow in the seven-piece outfit bustling around tall lead singer and guitarist Ray Benson’s bold, mega-bearded presence. (Incidentally, Benson was the most articular recurring commentator on Ken Burns’s fine country doc series.)   

Nelson’s live show remains the same, for the most part, as he kicks off with “Whiskey River” — with the big reveal of an epic American flag as a backdrop — and rambles through a decades-deep songbook of originals and classics. The old reliables kept coming, the likes of “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” “Always on My Mind,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” Kris Kristofferson’s anthemic “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” his signature take on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia,” the mortality-snubbing “Roll Me Up,” and, natch, “On the Road Again” (was he ever off it?).

Near show’s end, he sweetly sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with his granddaughter at his side, and Asleep at the Wheel members joining in (Benson served as electric guitarist in the Nelson band).
        
To conjure up an old rallying cry among us true believers — please, especially now — “Willie Nelson for President!”

---

Earthy Sounds

I swung by the Earth Day Festival at Alameda Park early last Saturday (early, as in, before noon) and tried to pay due attention to the environmentally inspired booths and the sometimes sci-fi-ish models in the green vehicle zone. But, alas, the prospect of music tugged my ear and pulled me over to the festival stage.

From a distance, I heard a nimble guitarist and soul-riffing singer atop a solid-if-static-sounding band — all of which turned out to be the impressive one-man band of Will Breman. Tuning into the occasion, Breman shifted from the R&B/rock (“rock and blues?”) basis of his sound to a sweet and eco-kindly folk tune, “Tiny House.” Breman sang and fluidly riffed over a bed of loops and sequences, while keeping the whole effect somehow organic and, yes, earthy. Color me impressed.

---

Good News From the French Baroque Chamber

Camerata Pacifica, the Adrian Spence–led chamber music operation going strong in Santa Barbara for 34 years, distinguished itself by gamely programming music from the broad swath of classical music history. The focus zooms up to the present and future tense, such as the much-anticipated world premiere accordion piece by Clarice Assad on its season-closing program, May 16, at Hahn Hall.

As for the April program, last Friday at the Hahn, the focus shifted back to the baroque, as flutist Emily Ferguson presided over the second of two concerts in CamPac’s new baroque music sidebar. This month’s model went by the winking title The French Dispatch, a tidy and cleverly packaged survey of 18th-century French baroque music, framed by an opening dose of the reigning composer of French baroque music, Rameau, and closing with the “Paris Quartet” of German baroque rock star Telemann.

Ferguson explained that the group plays on replicas of period instruments, including the smaller baroque guitar and lute (Stephen Stubbs), the pre-cello viola da gamba (Doug Balliett), baroque violin (Rachell Ellen Wong), and Michael Sponseller on an ornately painted harpsichord in conjunction with Ferguson’s deeper-toned wooden baroque flute. For added sonic gravitas, the instruments were tuned down a whole step. The special guest was tenor Karim Sulayman, who lent his sure, rich vocal gifts to Louis-Nicolas Clérambault’s Pirame et Tisbé, (a Greek mythic precursor to the “Romeo and Juliet” archetype) and Anne Madeleine Guédon de Presles’s love and lost-love songs.

As Ferguson noted, the Presles performance was, to her knowledge, a world premiere of a piece once consigned to the dusty closet of neglect. So, for the record, let it hereby be known that a world premiere of a piece circa 1754 had its first public unveiling at CamPac’s SoCal run, including the Hahn Hall stop, just one of the reasons to celebrate the new CamPac-goes-Baroque phenom.

---

To-Doings:

Two weeks back, the always-enterprising Santa Barbara Music Club hosted an all-too-rare organ concert in town, featuring the accomplished Orange County–based Lynnette McGee giving an artful workout to the fine and versatile organ housed at First United Methodist Church. Her program was a fascinating journey through time and culture, from Max Reger to Louis Vierne’s tour de force masterpiece Troisième symphonie, Op. 28; with stops at the living, breathing composer Johannes Matthias Michel’s Cuban-esquerie; and the Pastorale of George Whitefield Chadwick, who helped usher JS Bach’s sublime organ music back into service in the U.S.

Next up on the Music Club’s calendar is the program Music from Ukraine and America, at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (head over to the beloved hangout of Java Station and hang a left on Auhay).