ON the Beat | April Musical Showering

---

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on March 4, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

---

It is customary that, in the “serious” music circles, April brings it on. We can count on various presenters to steer their seasons to some of its most formidable programming in this springtime holy month. In Santa Barbara this year, that tradition stands. It’s time to take stock of the many tempting concert options and get outta the house.
        
On Tuesday of this week, CAMA ended its luminous (if slightly truncated) season on the high note(s) of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields stirring up sonic splendor at the Granada. Joshua Bell appeared as violinist-leader, and the program boasted a brand-new piece, Flight of Moving Days, by noted jazz-classical composer Vince Mendoza, with percussionist Douglas Marriner in a spotlight of a work in tribute to his grandfather and Academy founder Sir Neville Marriner.

April’s slate of calendar-marking concerts includes two of the world’s premier — and more forward-thinking — string quartets at Campbell Hall, hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures. The Danish String Quartet ends its Doppelgänger series with a new Thomas Adès piece, on Tuesday, April 10 (see story here), and the bellwether new-minded Kronos Quartet, a frequent visitor to Santa Barbara over the decades, stops here on Saturday, April 27, as part of its grand 50th anniversary. (Is that possible? They seem so forever young.)
        
Over in the Santa Barbara Symphony corner, this month’s program tilts in an Israeli/Jewish direction with its Mahler Meets Klezmer: Titans of Sound program, combining Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” and idiomatically nimble klezmer advocate/apostate David Krakauer performing Polish-born film composer Wlad Marhulets’s Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet. Opera Santa Barbara closes another engaging and varied season on a contemporary and Spanish theme, with Hector Armienta’s 2022 version of Zorro, at the Lobero Theatre April 19 and 21.

Choices will be tough on that weekend, with the Symphony, Opera S.B., and a significant local recital on the calendar: Young violin sensation Randall Goosbymakes his local debut at Hahn Hall on Saturday, April 20, with a program including important Black composer Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and William Grant Still.
        
And not to forget the venerable chamber music magnet that is Camerata Pacifica, always delivering musical depth and diversity at Hahn Hall (one of four venues on its monthly SoCal-hopping schedule). This month’s model, on Friday, April 26, has a special appeal for those of us craving more Baroque music in our aural diets, with a French Baroque menu featuring underrated great Rameau (the star of Daniil Trifonov’s masterful piano recital last year, incidentally) and 18th-century French composer Anne Madeleine Guédon de Presles. Yes, she was a she.

Genuine living jazz legend Herbie Hancock makes one of his too-rare appearances in town, after some intriguing outside the box shows at the Lobero (in duet with the late, great Wayne Shorter and in an unfortunately unrecorded “lost band,” with saxist Gary Thomas and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington). This time, he heads to the Arlington on Wednesday, April 17, with a new-ish band, featuring one of our greatest tenor saxists, Chris Potter, in the ranks, and trusty Hancock ally trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard. Hancock, now 83, has been a road-hugging workhorse in recent years, showing up at many global festivals (I caught him at both the Umbria festival in Italy and as headliner at the Monterey Jazz Festival last fall), and seems ever-ready to both go deep and leave the audience in a grin-some and grooving mode. Count this one as a not-to-miss.

Occupying its own unique space in the hybrid jazz/film/solo percussion realm, the Arlington program on Friday, April 19, brings the superlative drummer Antonio Sánchez back to town, in the role of film composer/live onstage accompanist for a screening of  Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Best Picture Oscar–winning Birdman. The refreshing texture and pulse of a drum-based film score is one thing; to hear it performed live and in sync is a rare experience (I heard/watched it at UCLA a few years ago and was duly wowed).

One of the few so-called “world music” shows this season arrives in the high, deep — and infectiously rhythmic — style of famed Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, at Campbell Hall on Sunday, April 7.
        
What to say about American treasure Rhiannon Giddens? Call the golden-voiced banjoist, musicologist, and mold-breaker an African-Americana artist — with a Pulitzer and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant on her mantle — at your own peril. Her dimensions spread far beyond simple categorization, as we 805 dwellers have been reminded within the past year, when she appeared as intrepid director/key performer at last summer’s Ojai Music Festival, head of last fall’s Silk Road Ensemble show at the Granada, and now in the driver’s-seat spotlight with her band at the Arlington, on Tuesday, April 23. She’s out to promote another ear-and-soul grabbing album, You’re the One.
        
Go. She’s the one.

---

To-Doings:

The still-young musical entity known as the Santa Barbara Chamber Players returns to the busy classical calendar at First Methodist Church on Saturday, April 6, with an intriguing program. Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 will be in the house, for old times’ sake, but the more interesting stops along the way come from the great “nuevo tango” king Astor Piazzolla — his “Adiós Nonino,” orchestra by Eduardo Marturet — and Gabriel Fauré’s suite Pelléas et Mélisande, timed with Fauré’s centennial year.
        
Few chart-sweeping American pop singers have had a more serious vocal chops and clarity than Johnny Mathis, the singer whose list of hits include 1957’s “Chances Are,” “Misty,” and “Wild Is the Wind.” Personally, his tune “99 Miles from L.A.” hits an especially bittersweet note. Luckily for us, Mathis periodically stops in to play the Chumash Casino, partly because of family connections in the Valley. Catch him in his timeless glory this Friday, April 5.
        
Also up Santa Ynez Valley way, the “Tales from the Tavern” series continues next Wednesday in the kitschy comfort of the Maverick Saloon, with storied singer-songwriter Willie Nile.