ON the Beat | A Legendary Line-man Hits the County, Jimmy Webb at the Lobero

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on July 6, 2023. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Great American Songwriter in the House

A short list of undeniably great songwriters of the past half-century, after the Great American Songbook creators, is an inherently subjective topic to broach. From this seat, the top-five list would include Burt Bacharach, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and Jimmy Webb. Webb’s now-and-again life as a solo artist was always eclipsed by the traveling power of his songs as sung by luminaries, but it can be great to hear it from the conjurer’s mouth, as we’ll get a chance when he makes a rare local appearance, at the Lobero on Thursday, July 13.

Webb has somehow managed to burrow into the heart of pop craft while concocting his own sophisticated dialect as a songwriter, a gift that, in his best tunes, worked wonders and added up to a thinking person’s ear-candy box. Certainly, that magical balance found profound expression in songs ennobled by Glen Campbell — especially the masterpiece “Wichita Lineman,” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” as well as through such gems in his songography as the hypnotic “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” (widely covered, and with a definitive version by Linda Ronstadt, with Little Feat’s Bill Payne at the piano) and “Highwayman” (beautifully cut by The Highwaymen).

Let’s not forget that peculiar ode to an existential pastry, “MacArthur Park,” made a hit by Richard Harris but for my money made immortal by Frank Sinatra, or the weirdly infectious “Up, Up and Away,” the perky hit for the Fifth Dimension. In all, Webb work accounts for some of the finer, not necessarily categorizable pop songs in the history of pop. Says me and millions of others.

Music Academy Corner

As we ease into the hearty thicket of the Music Academy’s summer bounty of classical music offerings, the bigger marquee events grab at our attentions. Take, for instance, last Saturday night’s splashy symphonic takeover of The Granada Theatre, to the bigger-is-better tune of Holst’s The Planets — plus a delightful West Coast premiere of ascending Black composer Jessie Montgomery’s melodically and texturally mobile new jewel, Hymn for Everyone. Famed maestro Osmo Vänskä led the Academy Festival Orchestra, up to its usual high caliber tricks, capped off by Holst’s jukebox-y parade of planetary tributes — a strong influence on John Williams’s Star Wars scores — and Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide as a ripe appetizer.

But there are plenty of other pleasures in the margins of the Academy calendar (check the calendar here), including open-to-the-public master classes, humble yet cool chamber concerts such as the “Chamber Night” in the small Lehmann Hall next Wednesday (July 12), and more.