ON the Beat | Blues Beach Town

Mitch Kashmar | Credit: Ted Rhodes

It may come as a surprise to outsiders that an affluent and tourist-flocked beach town like Santa Barbara — basking in its “American Riviera” clout — can also boast having produced important blues artists and culture. But this is the burg which produced Kim Wilson, a k a “Goleta Slim,” who went on to form the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and two of its other claims to bluesworld fame — former local Pontiax leader Mitch Kashmar and country-blues duo Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan hail from these parts.

It will be old worldly home week when Kashmar and Ball and Sultan play an eagerly awaited show at the Carrillo Recreation Center this Saturday, May 31, for the Santa Barbara Blues Society — which happens to be the oldest continuously running blues society in the United States. A mayoral certificate is in order: Santa Barbara officially has the blues and disseminates it out into a world in need of same.

Musical Family Cresting

Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Isata Kanneh-Mason | Credit: Courtesy

In the past few years, Santa Barbara has thankfully becoming a stopping place for the British sensation that is Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Isata Kanneh-Mason, the cellist-pianist siblings who have established themselves as major artist on the world stages. The pair have appeared in UCSB Arts & Lectures–hosted settings — as the duo will again at Campbell Hall tonight, May 29 — and in other musical settings in town. Tonight’s program includes cello sonatas of Fauré, Poulenc, and Mendelssohn, but special attention goes to young British violinist-composer Natalie Kouda’s new work Tor Mordôn, written for this duo and celebrating the Welsh element of their family lineage.

The Kanneh-Masons’ deep and masterful artistry is always welcome here. Info here.

Kentucky Wonder

Tessa Lark, the Kentucky-born violinist/fiddler making waves and news for her mastery of both classical music and bluegrass, was more than just paying lip service when she took to the Hahn Hall stage last week for her debut in Santa Barbara. The warm, good-humored musician extolled the beauty and inspiration of our beloved city, saying “it gives new meaning to the phrase ‘I can’t work under these conditions.’”

Over the course of her diverse and upbeat recital, part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Hear and Now series, Lark demonstrated the fruits of her hard work, but always with a sense of play in the margins. With impressive piano accompanist Amy Yang (a Music Academy of the West alum) touched on the folk-tinged theme of her program by opening with Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances and called on those staples of the violinist wheelhouse, Eugène Ysaÿe and Fritz Kreisler, handy suppliers of virtuosic violin showpieces.

But she also revealed her own creative pilot light on pieces like her teasing Ysaÿe Shuffle and her dazzling 16th note chugalug of her Jig and Pop (Kentucky meets Vienna). She explained to the crowd that, after writing the piece out before learning it, discovered its challenge upon first trying to play it and wondered “who’s the asshole who wrote such hard music!?” Further bedazzlement arrived in the closer John Corigliano’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, and double-scooped encore of a Kentucky fiddler tune and Kreisler’s Liebestod, leaving the happy audience humming on the way to their cars.

Taylor Remade

There was a point towards the end of James Taylor’s latest gracing of the Santa Barbara Bowl stage when an inset image of his familiar face loomed large on the jumbotron-ish screen, suggesting a kind of Wizard of Oz–like presence. Call it a Wizard of James moment, casting him as an all-powerful but also benevolent and humble figure whose music seems to make fans feel that we’ve got a friend. Seminal singer-songwriter paradigm Taylor, one of those uber-famous legacy artists whose Bowl shows feel like renewable homecomings, has cast his influence over generations. This we heard in the musical DNA of the gifted young opening trio Tiny Habits.

At the Bowl (on night one of a two-night stand), Taylor’s generous two-hour show covered various waterfronts of his career, with a group of “traveling songs” and the reliably moving stuff of “Shed a Little Light,” the lulling and ultimately tragic farewell to a suicidal friend; and “Fire and Rain,” one of the greatest songs ever to hit the hit parade. (The urban myth that Taylor wrote that song while “relaxing” at Camarillo is not true, although is was partly written in a rehab facility.) Prefacing a personal favorite of mine, “Only a Dream in Rio,” with its seductively circular chordal logic (like Jobim’s “Waters of March”), Taylor informed us that he wrote the song on Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil’s own guitar in a Rio hotel room.

Taylor, himself a nimble guitarist with a sophisticated musical vocabulary, hires very well, of course. This band featured such greats as keyboardist Larry Goldings, guitarist Michael Landau, and drummer Chad Wackerman. The musicians had their spotlight moments but understood the presiding objective is to compliment the song, as created by one of our great song-makers — very much alive and well at 77. The Wizard prevails.

(See Leslie Dinaberg’s full review here).

The Buzz About Bill

Bill Frisell and Good Dog | Credit: Courtesy

I keep running into folks still buzzing about the hypnotically fine recent Lobero show by Bill Frisell’s Good Dog band — and not just the jazz nerds and usual suspects. He may have started out and is generally stamped as a “jazz guitarist,” but Frisell’s expansive and inclusive musical persona has led him into a wide array of genre corners and blurred zones. With this Good Dog band (the name taken from his rustically ear-friendly 1990 album Good Dog, Happy Man) the music’s kinship with jamband aesthetics and a resistance to individual solos, per se, drew the love and attention of listeners of many camps to the Lobero, an eminently compatible room for Frisell’s magic.

From the outset of the long, mutating, and jam-coated set, Frisell was obviously in a groove element — rhythmically and also atmosphere-wise — with old friends, very much on the same page. Frisell has played with solid bassist Tony Scherr and subtly inventive drummer Kenny Wollesen for decades, and has been a regular ally of pedal steel player Greg Leisz in more recent years (both have played with Montecito’s own Charles Lloyd, who was in the house).

Yes, there were song structures, from his own originals to “Turn, Turn, Turn” and even a surprise snack of “Surfer Girl” (a tip of the hat to California?), but a more pressing concern was building a better collective groove and vibe. Frisell did work into his more jazz-flavored approach on a lustrous solo take on “Dear Old Friend” for the first encore, with his signature style of blending melody on top and savory contrapuntal notes below, and the show closed with “Shenandoah,” in the soul-soothing mode only Frisell can muster. The Bill buzz continues.

To-Doings:

In the slim pickings department of classical concerts on a weekday, the dial points to the occasional Noon Concerts at Trinity series in the tranquil ambience of Trinity Episcopal Church, on Friday, May 30, at noon link. Series founder and organizer, bassoonist Bill Wood, jumps into the spotlight for a program he’s calling 50 Years of Bassoon, with music of Piazzolla, Alec Wilder, Lussier, Montano, and Phillips.