In a career blessed by laid-back luck, terrific timing, and key childhood connections-oh yeah, and a mellow music-making talent-most wouldn’t call Jack Johnson a cunning businessman. The sometime Santa Barbara resident’s rise to global stardom seemed about as easy as catching your third shoulder-high wave at an empty point break.
The extraordinary Touch the Names, currently in production at Ensemble Theatre Company, pulls the audience into the shadows on a wall. The wall is the Vietnam War Memorial, and the shadows are the lost lives recorded there.
The Santa Barbara band Clark is the dreamy side-project of Gabriel Friley, whose main band is the excellent Widescreen Reason. This Saturday at The Mercury Lounge, the Clarksters will be lulling the crowd into auditory submission with a CD release show for their gorgeous new album Here Comes Tomorrow, (Silent Film Records). Friley’s vox and thoughtful acoustic guitar, coupled with wife Dana’s fingerpickin’ geetar and sweet backing vocals, blended with Andy White’s multi-instrumentation, bring to mind a little bit of Nick Drake.
My east-coast buddy Robert Pinsky’s Americans’ Favorite Poems project had dock workers and Bill Clinton, Air Force enlistees and my mother-in-law telling the world why they loved a work by Robert Frost or Dorothy Parker or Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi, and then reading that poem aloud, a poem important to their lives.
So you’re going to tie the knot. Cupid has done his work and now yours begins. Where to start on the long list of items needed to make the day as special as your dreams?
Likeany good sequel, this one picks up with our hero (that would be me) who’s found herself in dire straits. That is to say, I was on the couch, pounding coffee like an 18-year-old pounds Natural Light, while desperately commanding my feet to suck it up and carry me through another several nights of fabulous Film Festival fun.
Nonetheless, this year we tried, so what follows is a roundup-in no particular order-of what our own critics felt were the best and worst parts of this year’s SBIFF.
There’s a lot of talk these days about special interests-how they need to be curbed, reigned in, and otherwise muzzled. It’s the same old story: Greedy fat cats shelling out gazillions in political donations to maintain the status quo, despoil the environment, and keep the boot heel of oppression firmly planted on the necks of the working person.
It’s great to be at a show where everyone is there to see the performer. Such is the case at the Sings Like Hell series, which isn’t as much about a “scene” as it is about music fans coming out to listen to new voices or longtime favorites. So the atmosphere is always electric, because SLH fans go to the beautiful Lobero Theatre to get involved with great music. As it should be.
Along with the dazzling modern jazz one expects from Chick Corea, his current band, Touchstone, brought the sights and sounds of new flamenco to Santa Barbara on Tuesday, including a marvelous dancer, Auxi Fernandez, who joined them onstage for the second half of the concert. The addition of the dancer invigorated the crowd, elicited cries of “guapa” (“good looking”) from some, and turned the atmosphere of Campbell Hall into that of a sexy Spanish nightclub for the remainder of the night.
