ON the Beat | On McKay, NAMM, Fung, and Concert Action in Motion

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on February 1, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Accentuating the Positive and its Evil Twin, Tunefully

Although the new music year is still, well, new and fresh, the finest musical outing I’ve encountered so far came in the deceptively gentle and sweet form of singer-songwriter-soother-provocateur Nellie McKay, at SOhO last week. Equipped with her elastic feel on piano and ukulele, as she has in past local shows at SOhO and the Lobero’s “Sings like Hell” series, the supple-voiced McKay demonstrated again why she’s one of the more underrated artists on the scene.

Which scene is that? It’s one of her own devising, which ranged from the dishing up of tasty variations on beloved old standards — from the opener “My Romance” (as a perky waltz) to the closer “Accentuate the Positive.” But she also goes for the stuff of being “Mrs. In-Between” the positive and edgy, as on the set’s previous tune “Make a Wish,” frankly addressing the realities of Black life in America going back to slavery, and with a Jeffrey Dahmer subplot for comic shock value. That song comes on like a bracing finale on McKay’s fab new album hey guys, watch this, from which the SOhO show also included the good cheer of “Drinking Song” and “Drifting” as well as the sneakily stark anti-war piece “The Party Song.”

Her two-set show also included a wink of local color with her uke-lined version of “Wooden Ships,” by the late local David Crosby, along with an uncensored take on Country Joe and the Fish’s f-bombing “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” retooled with the refrain “I don’t give a damn/Next stop, we bomb Iran … whoopie! We’re all gonna die.”
        
Performance art sneaks into her self-designed picture, as well. We sense the paradoxical mix of sincerity and irony even in her between-song banter. Regarding Santa Barbara, she noted that “this is a beautiful town with a unique atmosphere … Have you heard of ‘Dementiaville’? It seems almost like you could slice the air and it would be like cotton candy, or something foamy.” Ok then.

McKay has somehow created a composite persona which channels both Doris Day and Ani DiFranco. Bless her heart and active art-making mind, not to mention her particular way with a song. She’s welcome back to our foamy town any old time.

What’s in a NAMM?

Music gear geeks and gawkers, musicians, and music merchants from the world over have been known to descend en masse on the Anaheim Convention Center, for the phenom known as NAMM. We’re happy to report that, more or less, NAMM has found its groove again, after the upheaval of pandemic’s re-ordering of reality and cultural/public events. NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) is a venerable (launched in 1902!) and massive trade show/convention settling into the convention center, just across the boulevard from Disneyland, somehow fittingly.

Last week’s 2024 edition was bustling with the usual fanfare, hype, and cacophonic buzz, with business transactions transpiring in the margins and the line of networking. For curious visitors who like to wander as much of the spread as possible to take it all in (present company included), there is a particular cathartic and chaotic charge in walking through the drum hall, for instance, and being pummeled and massaged by multiple drummers drumming — and not in time — or hearing piled-on guitar licks on the faster-is-better plan.

The electronic instrumental and digital halls range from cutting edge technologies in playing and recording tech to the warmer old school spirits of the vintage analog Moog and Mellotron booths. On the Convention Center’s second floor, acoustic piano companies — some dating back centuries — offer a kinder, gentler counterbalance to the modern blandishments of the downstairs din. Charles Ives-ian spirit lives on at NAMM.

There are also scheduled performances, artist signings, seminars, and other more orderly activities in the Big House.

Among the Santa Barbara angles at NAMM, we find a sense of comfort and pride over at the booth held forth by Seymour Duncan, the world-renowned custom guitar pickup maker based out of Santa Barbara/Goleta since 1976. This year, in a refreshing twist on the celebrity signing tradition at NAMM, the autographing legend on site was one Maricela “MJ” Juarez, famous as a masterful pickup maker and right-hand person for Duncan going back 30 years. She showed up in guitar-shaped glasses with a winning smile, at the ready with a gold sharpie.

That’s my kinda music world celebrity.

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And Now, Hear This

There are splashier and more household name-powered items on the UCSB Arts & Lectures marquee each season, but some of the roster’s greatest “secret” shows occur in the organization’s “Hear and Now” series at Hahn Hall, which is geared towards bringing emerging, but internationally anointed young classical artists into the glorious, hallowed hall of the Hahn, perhaps most famously (so far) being a just-emerging piano legend Yuja Wang years back. Last year’s list included a stunning performance by French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, taking on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in the composer’s extended cut.
        
We got a taste of another inspired young livewire last Sunday when fast-rising and award-winning 24-year-old cellist Zlatomir Fung gave an impeccably played recital with pianist Benjamin Hochman. Aside from stellar performances by both, the afternoon won ample points for left-of-standard programming, with its set of works in five movements. Schumann and Russian composer Tsintsadze framed the recital, on the simple pleasure turf of folk-based writing.

But the heady meat of the program came with young composer Marshall Estrin’s Cinematheque  — written expressly for his friend Fung, based on the cellist’s favorite films — and a superb reading of Benjamin Britten’s Cello Sonata, originally written for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1961. Britten’s score, with livelier inventions enveloping the brooding, centrally-placed “Elegia, Lento” movement, also demonstrated the taut mesh and empathetic links between these two musicians. Estin’s piece, given its west coast premiere here, applied variously-impressions of the films Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Rashomon, Annie Hall, Clarie’s Knee and Moonlight, delves into a palette of sometimes dissonant and terse areas, with a tipsy taste of stride piano and a surprising, sly quote of “Ain’t She Sweet” in the Annie Hall segment.

Fung is one to watch and listen for, hopefully returning to a Santa Barbara venue near us.

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To-Doings

Jazz fans have access to one of the precious few world-class jazz shows in town next Thursday, February 8, when Campbell Hall plays host to the Blue Note Quintet (see story here) honoring the grand old jazz label’s 85th anniversary. In the band are some of the finer players of the younger set — pianist-music director Gerald Clayton, alto saxist Immanuel Wilkins, vibist Joel Ross, drummer Kendrick Scott and trusty bassist Matt Penman. One for the not-to-miss list.