ON the Beat | Ojai Beckons, Choral Closing, Blocked Party

Pianist Craig Taborn will perform at the Ojai Music Festival | Photo: Courtesy

Ojai Music Festival Music Director and Flutist Claire Chase | Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk

When it comes to the big news in pre-summer musical culture in the 805, all roads lead to Ojai the first weekend of June. The 79th Ojai Music Festival — internationally famous in its own contemporary and adventurous musical niche — lands in the leafy embrace of the Libbey Bowl starting tonight (June 5) and navigates a dense course of concerts and other programming through Sunday evening. Fans of forward-thinking modern music will miss it at their own peril.

Each year’s festival is a new composite invention and microcosm unto itself, and this year’s program promises a unique forum, as designed by the charismatic and organically chance-taking flutist Claire Chase. Chase, who has dazzled in Ojai in recent years as a performer, has assembled a program rich with women composers, premieres, chamber-sized delights (including the eminent and eminently hip JACK Quartet) and elite performers in the zone where new music mixes it up with avant-jazz. The latter list includes spectacular pianists Craig Taborn (long overdue in Ojai) and Cory Smythe, and the percussionist-composer Susie Ibarra (who, in a case of good timing, won a Pulitzer just last month).

If less engaged in standard contemporary composers and canons, Chase’s Ojai package invites us into a different realm of new musical thought. See story here.

Rallying for and Toasting to the Choral Causes

JoAnne Wasserman conducts the Santa Barbara Choral Society, June 1, 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

Last Sunday afternoon, in the acoustically and atmospherically friendly Trinity Lutheran Church, the Santa Barbara Choral Society (SBCS) convenedbefore a packed house to send off its 77th season to the tune of a suitably named program, “The Many Shades of Choral.” Akin to the group’s annual varied “Hallelujah Project” at Christmastime and other diversity-rules concert programs it has presented, a varied musical menu was led by the veteran director JoAnne Wasserman and featuring a notable newbie, Kevin Su Fukagawa as versatile piano accompanist.

The sum effect served as both a satisfying study in choral contrasts and proof of this group’s collective mettle and sense of adventure. Robert Lowry’s “How Can I Keep from Singing” fittingly opened the concert, and serious doses of Mozart’s choral music — from his Requiem and Vesperae solennes de confessore — blended in naturally with the Moravian folk song “O Lasko, Lasko,” the spiritual “Soon Ah Will Be Done,” and the Kenyan folk song “Wana Baraka” as a festive closer.

Some of the most moving music of the afternoon came courtesy of inspired choral composer Morten Lauridsen. Special attention is warranted for Lauridsen’s sensitive setting of “Prayer,” Dana Gioia’s poem about his infant son, who died of sudden infant death syndrome. The work is both a lament and an affirmation, with a sheen of resiliency and hope.

For this occasion, we got an insider’s peek at the dedicated members making up the glorious collective SBCS voice — a sound “greater than the sum of its parts.” Select singers gave testimonials between pieces on the program. Long-standing member and supporter Brooks Firestone spoke about his later-life conversion to the choral cause, launching his singing life starting at age 65. Along with his wife, Kate, Firestone sang with the group until this year, deciding, at age 89, it was time to move on.

From the younger end of the spectrum, the talented thirty-something Will Breman is celebrating his tenth year in the group, having built up a musical life including appearances on The Voice and who shows up as an impressive pop singer-songwriter and one-man band around town. Other members spoke about memorable moments on international tours the group has embarked on, including a chance to sing in the Vatican.

Yes, this important Santa Barbara cultural institution has been around and is still in the process of going places.

Hippest Block in Town for a Night

Mitch Kashmar at the S.B. Blues Society, May 31, 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

A kind of hip harmonic convergence (and harmonica convergence) descended on one Santa Barbara block on Saturday night, creating both option anxiety for entertainment-seekers and a reminder of the occasional pile-up of possibilities in town. At the Lobero Theatre, the record company mogul/nice guy/pop music encyclopedia Hale Milgrim was hosting one of his living room-like “Quips & Pix & Flix” programs, this one a double-bill with a slide show by the legendary (and nonpareil Laurel Canyon scenester) rock photographer Henry Diltz.

Almost concurrently, a full house at the Carrillo Recreation Center’s Santa Barbara Blues Society wingding was basking and shimmying to a rare “old home week” of widely known blues masters with Santa Barbara roots — blues harpster and singer Mitch Kashmar with his ace band and the country-blues duo of Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan.

Before heading up a block to get the blues, I caught the first half of Hale’s presentation, which included his tale of selling records at his father’s toy store at age 14 — presaging a heady life in record store retailing and rising to the head of Capitol Records. At that tender age, Milgrim told us, “I knew then that music would be my life.” The most memorable music video I caught in the line-up was Avie Sheck’s hypnotic version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” with his Carnatic singer mother interjecting her contrapuntal lines in Hindi (check it here).

Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan at the S.B. Blues Society, May 31, 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

Ball and Sultan closed their short but juicy and history-steeped set with Ball’s “Perfect Woman” (spoiler alert: She owns a liquor store). Kashmar first wowed our town in the ‘80s with his potent and influential blues band the Pontiax, before heading to Los Angeles and ultimately to Portland and stints playing with War.

At the Rec Center, he was fully in charge with his musical gifts — and fully mustering up a Saturday night let-the-good-times-roll spirit in the room. But Kashmar generously passed solo space around to his band, including bassist Steve Nelson, keyboardist Jimmy Calire, drummer Tom Walsh, and guitarist Stuart Ziff — not to mention guests Debbie Davies and saxist John Schnackenberg. He/they dug into the songbooks of Jimmy Reed and Freddie King, but also detoured into a jazz corner for Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” and the New Orleans honk sauce of “The Second Line.”

Kashmar’s show added up to one of the finest Blues Society shows in recent memory, buffed up by the patina of local legacy. And it couldn’t have happened on a hipper block.

To-Doings:

Although the classical music concert seasons are fading into summer mode, there remain good reasons to get out and serious music — before the Music Academy of the West festival assumes its dominance of the classical music summer games in town later in June. We’re talking about the Santa Barbara Chamber Players giving a fundraising concert at the Trinity Lutheran Church on Sunday, June 8 at 3 p.m. The program is a refreshing one off to the left of standard fare, with American composer Eric Ewazen’s “Cumberland Suite,” Nielsen’s Serenata in vano, and Schubert’s Octet in F.

On Saturday, June 7 at First United Methodist Church, the Santa Barbara Music Club hosts the second of its 2025 Scholarship Showcase Concerts. See and hear possible bringers-on of the future of music.