ON the Beat | Seasoned Voices, En Masse

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on December 12, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Fans of choral music in Santa Barbara are blessed to have ample listening options in our hometown. And while choral concert action shows up on the calendar only sporadically, when it rains, it pours, especially during Christmas time. This weekend, a veritable choral downpour is in store, with the simultaneous programs by the always enchanting a cappella group Quire of Voyces, the Santa Barbara Choral Society (with Meredith Baxter doing “Night Before Christmas” reading honors) and the 20th annual Westmont College”Christmas Festival,” at The Granada Theatre.

During last week’s “First Thursday” goings-on, a large crowd of happy campers decamped in the Ludington Court area of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, basking in the sound of Quire of Voyces, led for 31 years by Nathan Kreitzer. Benefitting from the spacious acoustics of the “room”—  just as the group does in its performance home base, the old worldly sanctuary of the St. Anthony’s Chapel — the ensemble gave a ripe primer in what’s to come on Saturday and Sunday afternoons this weekend. At one point, they performed composer-in-residence Steve Dombek’s arrangement of a Polish hymn, and Kreitzer quipped, “if you speak Polish, come up to us afterward and tell us what we missed.”

That Thursday event was both delicious and felt a bit subversive — in the best way, allowing us to savor choral music in a public space. A very different ambience hovers over the annual Christmas concerts in the sanctuary, which can lend an almost mystical sensation of escaping the humdrum world or specific time or place for a spell. Key word: “spell.”

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Green and Greener Grasses

Last week’s slate of music worth catching hit a rootsy pinnacle with the return of the truly dazzling Molly Tuttle and her band Golden Highway, brought to Campbell Hall by UCSB Arts & Lectures. In recent years, Tuttle has passed through town in increasingly larger venues, from SOhO to the Lobero and now the Campbell (next stop, the Bowl?), in sync with a rightfully celebrated career in upward motion, kissed by Grammy awards and an expanding legion of fans — bluegrass diehards and beyond.

As the saying goes, Tuttle is a triple threat as a hot and limber flat-picking (and sometimes clawhammer-style) guitarist, singer, and songwriter. As a bonus, in the live setting, she conjures a warmly charismatic presence who looks good in a sliver cape and sunbeam crown. She also “hires well,” for a band with no weak links: fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, banjo player Kyle Tuttle, mandolinist Dominic Leslie, and bass/harmony singer Shelby Means laid down the goods in steamy, soulful, and creative fashion.

Tuttle slalomed through a varied set, from her new Nonesuch EP City of Gold to her classic in the making Crooked Tree, and cover songs ranging from a radically made-over “Shady Grove” to John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and, yes, Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u.” Now more than ever, Tuttle makes it all work, and sing, and dance with flying fingers.

Paying Respects to a New Music Champion, in Song and Sound

Still one of the few ongoing local sources of classical music of the here and now (and, well, the past century or so), UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music (a k a ECM, not to be confused with the record label) was launched nearly three decades ago under the aegis of noted composer and Corwin Chair William Kraft. Jeremy Haladyna was the director for many years, retiring a few years ago and composer/pianist Sarah Gibson took up the leadership role, but tragically died of cancer at  the age of 38. Gibson’s résumé includes performing with important new music groups — Bang on a Can and L.A.’s aptly named Wild Up — and co-founded the fascinating piano duo HOCKET.

Last week’s winter ECM concert, directed by Jonathan Moerschel, was dedicated “in memory of Sarah Gibson,” and engaged a few of her intriguing duo pieces — the double cello “As one who loves poetry,” her violin/viola work “tiny, tangled world” (with some whistling in the mix), and a movement from the cello/marimba piece “Sea Monkey.” As suggested by the titles and unusual instrumental groupings, Gibson’s music straddles a line between serious intent and an imaginative pictorial style, in which consonance and dissonance engage in a productive dialogue.

ECM’s student ensemble is an impressive lot, showing commitment to the contemporary cause, as on the septet piece “new cosmologies” by inti figgis-vizueta, and especially the ritualistic fervor of Julius Eastman’s hypnotic “Stay On It” to close. (“Stay On It” was also a cathartic concert finale at the 2022 Ojai Music Festival.) The important classical, Black, scene-ostracized Eastman, a composer with gritty minimalist leanings, has zoomed into public play years after his 1990 death.

With the score’s blend of a recurring, chugging minimalist riff, blurred passages, and a mesmerizing lowdown/slowdown end section, this central Eastman work neatly wrapped up a concert of both ecstatic and elegiac dimensions.

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To-Doings:

If your Christmas music dance card isn’t full enough this weekend, do yourself a favor and swing by SOhO on Sunday at noon, for Miriam Dance Presents Gospel Brunch. As one who caught it last year, I can attest that this is a soul-stirring encounter, with or without brunch attached. That night at SOhO, the brotherly harmonizing folk-pop band Venice returns for one of its trademarked Christmas shows. Word has it that the show is sold-out, but the gods of cancellation may shine upon kindly hopefuls.