Sextet eighth blackbird.

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SURPRISE, SURPRISE:Contemporary music abhors a vacuum, or a lack of surprise elements. By that logic, last weekend’s Ojai Music Festival was a notably fresh and important contribution to the festival’s long and storied history. Beautifully and creatively put together by the festival’s “music director,” cherished new music ensemble eighth blackbird (only the second ensemble in that role, after the more staid Emerson Quartet), the four-day extravaganza managed to be a compact history of what’s recent and where it came from. The festival began tranquilly on Thursday night, with the program Music for a Summer Evening, featuring George Crumb’s piece of the same name. It all ended in a happy über-tutti heap at the end of Sunday evening’s feast-like five-hour marathon, with Louis Andriessen’s raucously brain-rattling Workers Union, the stage eventually filled with every musician brought into town for the weekend.

Those older historical stops included pianist Jeremy Denk’s truly dazzling performance of Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 1 (before a run through Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a surprisingly compatible concert-mate for the Ives), and the inventively staged cerebral Saturday Night Fever of Arnold Schoenberg’s landmark proto-Modernist Pierrot lunaire, circa 1910 — the then-odd chamber format of which laid the foundation for many a current contemporary ensemble, including eighth blackbird.

In the surprise-element corner, we had Friday night’s ambitious premiere of Steven Mackey/Rinde Eckert’s musical theater piece Slide (reviewed by Charles Donelan on page 78 of this week's print issue). Steve Reich’s indisputably great minimalist piece Music for 18 Musicians made its return to Libby Bowl, 30-plus years later, on Sunday morning, and had a latter-day echo in Reich’s Pulitzer-winning Double Sextet, premiered by eighth blackbird in 2008.

Another heroic figure-in-focus was Trimpin, the inimitable German-Seattle-ite junk-sound-sculptor/inventor/composer, who supplied sonic works in the park and Tigger-able gadgetry in the Bowl’s trees on Sunday night (P.S. watch for the fascinating new documentary Trimpin, The Sound of Invention, which screened at the Ojai Theatre). Another festival scene-stealer was the wondrous USC-employed composer Stephen Hartke, a star of Sunday’s marathon, through the vigorous ensemble blackbird-commissioned invention Meanwhile: Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays and his witty violin duet Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen — written in 1985 for former Santa Barbarans Michelle Makarski and Ronald Copes.

2009’s Ojai festival should go down as one of the finer and funner programs yet — meaner, leaner, and more audience-friendly while still clinging fiercely to the mandate of keeping the serious music torch burning.

LET THE DRINKING BEGIN:  It may seem a glib cheap shot to play up the fact that the Live Oak Music Festival is celebrating its 21st birthday this weekend, therefore entitling it to adulthood’s spoils — voting, driving, military duty, and now, of course, imbibing. But there is more to that story. This unique and widely admired festival launched with the best of intentions, including raising money for the Central Coast’s prized noncommercial radio station KCBX (based in San Luis Obispo, and at 89.5 FM) and representing many of the elements in the station’s diverse programming — with a particular emphasis on folk music, Americana, and world music, and occasionally jazz (more would be welcome, in today’s jazz-starved environment, but that’s another story).

Issa Sharp

Dave Alvin Heads to Live Oak

At age 21, the fully mature Live Oak Festival don’t need no stinking badges, no apology for its agenda, which this year includes Americana oldsters Rodney Crowell, Dave Alvin, and Jim Lauderdale, Malian Mamadou Diabete, Anonymous 4 with Darol Anger and Scott Nygard, New Orleans’s the subdudes and Trombone Shorty, and Girlyman (thank you, gubernator).

Ironically or not, the two main festivals in the Santa Barbara area take place outside of Santa Barbara proper, and outside of the typical spring and summer concert seasons. Off and up in Ventura County, we have the Ojai festival, 63 years old and counting (having just been through one of its youngest-spirited festivals in memory); and up in the green rambles of the blissfully undeveloped area south of Lake Cachuma, the Live Oak experience. We love these fests. And we need ’em.

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