ON the Beat | Sound Garden Meditation, Public Bacchanal, Pipeline Sublimity

Summer Solstice 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

You Know It Must be Summer Solstice Time in Santa Barbara When…

1) On your way to catch the big parade, you get a hearty dose of live blues at noon, as trusty blues providers Morganfield Burnett (blues harpist-singer Larry Edwards, guitarist Howard Miller, bassist Jill Avery, and drummer Brad Wisham) shakes up the Alameda Park stage.

2) When Santa Barbara Street is been subjected to a business-as-unusual takeover and hordes of in-towners and out-of-towners pack the sidewalks, as the 51st annual parade occupied the avenue for half a day with sun-worshipping pagans, fun-loving paraders, revelers, sidewalk observers, and merriment/mischief makers.

Summer Solstice 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

3) When the proceedings kick off with a big, choreographed dance group bedecked with feathery headdresses, bustiers, and Mondrian-esque midriffs to tunes dished out by Darla Bea, DJ to the stars and the hoi polloi.

4) When the infamous and city-altering 1925 earthquake is commemorated by mobile landmark buildings — the Old Mission, the original Californian Hotel, and the stalwart Granada — which morphs from giddy flapper era kitsch to shaking all over …

5) When your waning tolerance for the glut of prerecorded music this year gets a welcome reprieve via the guerilla brass band tactics of the Brasscals, making the streets safe for a street music ruckus in very real time. In other very live music news, the Hare Krishna gang returned with its high-minded pageantry and chant-alicious presence.

Sound Garden Musings

Lotusland sound meditation | Photo: Josef Woodard

Meanwhile, a world away from the blithe mayhem of Summer Solstice doings, Montecito’s Lotusland held one of its periodic sound meditation events in the glorious Japanese Gardens — certainly one of the more peaceful locales in the 805. Last week’s hour-long program, on a “Wellbeing Wednesday” at noon, turned out to be a combo sound meditation and ethnomusicology lesson, provided by the UCSB-connected musician and scholar Fabio Rambelli, performing on the entrancing small Japanese shō, whose roots make it one of the world’s oldest instruments.

Sound meditation at Lotusland | Photo: Josef Woodard

Used primarily in Japanese gagaku court music, the shō turns out to be an ideal facilitator in a sound meditation such as this, blending with the ambient sounds of birds, flowing water, wind, and yes, the occasional post-industrial age of a passing airplane.

Coincidentally, Rambelli’s sound meditation came close on the heels and parallel tracks of this year’s wondrous Ojai Music Festival, which featured the highly ambient/natural sound-minded composer Annea Lockwood (one of her mantras has to do with listening with, versus listening to sounds around us). Ojai also hosted the master Chinese sheng player Wu Wei, who played traditional music, a premiere by percussionist-composer Susie Ibarra, and in a surprisingly persuasive reading of J.S. Bach. As Rambelli explained to me, the “sheng,” an elaborate but compact reed instrument with kinship to the harmonica and organ, is the more modernized incarnation of the older shō, which has been a part of Japanese gagaku tradition for several centuries.

As Rambelli told the intimate gathering of 15 people, his fascination with the shō runs deep, although he also plays the saxophone in jazz-contemporary music settings. He has studied with a teacher from the 45th generation of shō mentors going back to the 600s. He sees the instrument as “a relic from a time when life was slower. It’s like a time capsule that takes me back.”

From my listener’s perspective, I was duly transported, away from the madness of the world of our troubled time and melted into the magical ambience of Lotusland. At least for an hour.

Percussionist Susie Ibarra | Photo: Courtesy

ON the Music Academy Notes Beat

The Music Academy of the West’s formidable summer “serious music” festival is off and running after last week’s opening with the fab four Takacs Quartet and a live orchestra-juiced up screening version of JAWS. The calendar heats up this next week, with the debut performance by the “brand new” Academy Festival Orchestra at The Granada Theatre on Saturday, June 28 — with Pictures at an Exhibition as the key work, led by maestro Anthony Parnther and with violin soloist Randall Goosby — and a percussion focus highlighted by the ever-popular Percussionfest at the Granda on Thursday, July 3 (see story here). The P-fest program includes music by Stewart (The Police) Copeland and percussionist-composer Andy Akiho, who seizes the spotlight in the “Composers in Context” concert at Hahn Hall on Wednesday.

TO-DOINGS:

Aficionados of live pipe organ music understand that, for one, organ music culture is very much a site-specific and site-reliant art form, in that thothe instrument is literally built into the host spaces — e.g. churches or such concert halls as the magnificent and wild style Disney Hall organ. Unlike most every other musical context, organ music requires us to come to the instrument/host space. You have to be there.

Aficionados also understand that a reliable source for hearing organ music requires one to go to church. In Los Angeles, one such pipe organ mecca is the First Congregational Church, close to MacArthur Park, home to one of the grandest instruments in the world, and a spectacular organist in charge, Christoph Bull.

In Santa Barbara, two of the greatest instruments are currently put to great use by a pair of impressive organists, coincidentally bearing the name Thomas. Thomas Joyce has been the organist of note at Trinity Episcopal Church, and the Los Angeles–based iconoclastic sensation Thomas Mellan has been kicking up beautiful musical dust storms over at the First Methodist Church in recent months. Even non-believers should take advantage of the musical fruits unfolding in these sacred spaces each Sunday, sometimes amounting to micro-concert-like postludes at the end of services, proper.

(Incidental note: Not sure why, but the Methodist congregation stays put and listens up to the postludes, whereas the Trinity group tends to largely exit chapel left, leaving a small group of organ fans in thrall. Their numbers are small, but ears and hearts big).

Case in point: Joyce performed the lesser-known Baroque composer Nicolas Bruhns’s engrossing and affirmative Praeludium in G in his extended postlude, filling this famed chapel with the kind of sonic grandeur only the “king of instruments” can deliver.

All of which is a long-winded introduction to an organ performance heads up. Joyce will give a rare organ recital in the picturesque All Saints-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Montecito on Saturday, June 28 at 3 p.m., dubbed a “Nelson Huber Memorial Organ Recital,” in honor of the late and long-standing organist in Santa Barbara. Joyce’s program is a suitably diverse mix of work, including the baroque business of the aforementioned Bruhns’ masterwork, J.S. Bach and Georg Böhm, Louis Vierne, Maurice Duruflé, and the acclaimed black composer Florence Price … and more.

Lake Street Dive, UCSB Campbell Hall, November 2015 | Photo: David Bazemore

Up and over at the Santa Barbara Bowl, this weekend’s draw is the Saturday night show featuring the loveable Lake Street Drive, whose soul-pop-jazz wardrobe first beguiled a local audience when they appeared as part of the mythic “Sings Like Hell” series at the Lobero Theatre. A motto of the series curated by Peggie Jones promised “the best music you’ve never heard,” and Lake Street Dive, at that moment, had yet to strike a large public chord. But cream rises, and an organic growth and fan base arrived according to cosmic divine, partly thanks to the unique magnetism of vocalist Rachael Price.

For a film-live music hoedown, with surf-spy culture in the wings, head over to SOhO on Thursday, July 3, when Robert Redfield’s wonderful Spencer the Gardener (STG) “rock doc” More than Just a Party Band will screen, followed by an in-the-flesh and real time show by STG itself.