ON the Beat | Dive on the Hill on High, Academy Action in Motion

Lake Street Dive’s Retro-Modern R&B Revue Seizes the Bowl, Music Academy Notes, Organ-ic Finery

Lake Street Dive, Santa Barbara Bowl, June 28, 2025 | Photo: Carl Perry

The trivialist and/or angle-seeking music fans among us may have noticed that Lake Street Dive’s initials spell out LSD. But sometimes, a cigar is a cigar and a coincidence is a coincidence. This is not a case of a “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” style secret subplot. Rather, this vibrant and smart American band’s saga goes something like this: A nerdy but hip pack of students from the New England Conservatory of Music, built around the magnetic vocalist Rachael Price and bassist-songwriter Bridget Kearney, forges a fresh sound grounded in R&B and pop but sprinkled with jazz spices, copping a band name based on a Minneapolis club of choice, on Lake Street.

The LSD sound starts a buzz which expands in an organic upward and outward motion. Hallucinogens have not been a part of the artistic arc or career plan, just an infectious passion and refreshing musicality in the veins.

Santa Barbara first caught the band early in its public rise, playing the Lobero as part of the “Sings like Hell” series in 2013. Cut to last Saturday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl, where Price pointed out that they last played the venue as an opener for the Avett Brothers in 2019 and now sold out the house as headliner. The all-ages crowd happily sucked up a mature sounding, tight, and uniquely soulful retro-modern R&B revue-esque show, replete with the sharp Huntertones horns, a crackerjack rhythm section and Price’s quietly commanding vocal powers. This was a Bowl show with no detectable slack or dead zones.

The young and dogmatically dressed act known as the 502s opened the evening with their friendly “lesser Lumineers” sound. Uniforms of pastel shorts and golf shirts suggested an ironic echo of the counter-to-the-counterculture Up with People project of the ’60s. Retooling nostalgic modes and musical manners seemed to be a theme of the night.

Tellingly, LSD’s setlist opened powerfully with “Good Together,” a riveting and almost old school soul tune, but in the unusual meter of 7/4. Closing out with another “Good” tune, the guitar riff-empowered “Good Kisser,” with stops at such tasties as “Hypotheticals,” “Call Off your Dogs,” “Dance with a Stranger,” and the premiere performance of a ripe new item, “Sweet Talking.” Cover material included a creatively paired down and slowed down version of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and a soul-infused version of The Band’s classic “Ophelia,” (covered a week before on that same stage by The Wood Brothers and St. Paul & the Broken Bones) sung by drummer Mike Calabrese.

A fan sitting behind us exuded to his friend “she’s the white Aretha!” At the risk of being a nerdy nitpicker, that’s not exactly right. Price has a measured and powerful voice, but one that generally sticks to the script of her intriguing melodies and their syncopated contours, rarely straying into the ecstatic riffing of such gospel-fueled singers as Aretha. But, especially live, that particular old musical script issued by this glorious band is something beautiful and heady/funky to behold, any chance we get.

On the Music Academy Notes Beat

Fortunately for us 805ers, the captivating young violinist Randall Goosby has been making his presence known in these parts, and the trend continues. Last season, he made his local debut at Hahn Hall as part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’s “Hear and Now” series. He returned to Hahn Hall last week, at the ripe age of 29, under the aegis of the Music Academy of the West’s (MAW) “Mosher Guest Artist” spot. Next up in his Santa Barbara stopover agenda, Goosby will appear as soloist in next season’s CAMA-hosted appearance by the Sphinx Ensemble on March 12, 2026.

For his Hahn Hall return, a nearly full house warmly greeted him along with his cellist brother Miles (an Academy alum), pianist Zhu Wang, and high level Academy fellows. Goosby opened, with an assured artistry, with 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges’s “Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano.” As Goosby noted of this legendary mixed-race French violinist, composer — and fencing champion! — the stubborn claim of Chevalier’s being “the black Mozart” should be amended: In his introduction, the witty Goosby urged, “I prefer to think of Mozart as the white Chevalier.”

After intermission, Goosby rose again to high levels of technical and poetic grace on Mendelssohn’s “Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor” and Beethoven’s “Septet in E-flat.” But by playing only token movements of those works, the atmosphere turned fragmented, untrue to the composer’s complete intentions. Suddenly, it felt more like an educational institution performance than a recital, per se.

The real highlight of the program came with Ravel’s revelatory “Sonata No. 2,” a three-movement adventure with a mercurial musical game plan, a tension-and-release gambit centered around the clearly jazz-inspired middle movement “Blues: Moderato.” In this polytonal blues turn, we hear the genius of Ravel’s fascination with this then fresh sound from America, but embedded in his own harmonic weave — which ended up influencing jazz to come. Goosby and his ally Wang got it, at the core and around the slippery edges.

Goosby’s is a welcome voice in this town, any time.

This week’s slate of MAW concerts is a busy one, starting with the ever-popular Percussionfest concert tonight, July 3 — bumping up from its usual Hahn Hall haunt to The Granada Theatre (see story here). Hear music of the Police’s Stewart Copeland and a special performance percussionist-composer Andy Akiho — on a sound-fitted sculpture by Japanese-American artist Jun Kaneko. A first at the Granada, and in Santa Barbara?

The Granada/MAW partnership continues on Saturday night with the Academy Festival Orchestra, conducted by David Danzmayr and again with Akiho in the spotlight, performing the Academy co-commissioned piece “Sculptures.” For western classical measure, the orchestra will also serve up Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra,” ushered into the more general public ear thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s musical scheme for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Organ-ic Musical Matters

Thomas Joyce at All Saints by the Sea, June 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

In the midst of Thomas Joyce’s impressive and healthily diversified two-hour organ recital at All-Saints-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church on Saturday afternoon, he made a sly reference to “organ nerds … and you know who you are.” True confession: I am part of that club, and was thrilled to hear Joyce — who can be heard weekly as the music director of the Trinity Episcopal Church — performing this special recital dedicated to the late Nelson Huber (1949-2022), a long-standing pillar of Santa Barbara’s church music world.

Joyce presented a variety of organ music from over the past 300-plus years, including renascent Black composer Florence Price, Louis Vierne, Maurice Duruflé, and a new take on “Amazing Grace” by respected youngster Paul Fey — born in 1998. My favorites came first, with a German Baroque three-pack by Nicolas Bruhns, JS Bach, and Georg Böhm, whose ruminative “Vater unser im Himmelreich” was played in the period-true “mean temperament” tuning. That’s one benefit of a digital organ, a tweakable technological wonder, if lacking actual pipes.

As a point of accidental continuity, Joyce ended his program with the dazzling “Carillon-Sortie” (a k a “postlude”) by French Baroque composer Henri Mulet. On Sunday morning at the First United Methodist Church, the “other” organist of note in town, Thomas Mellan, performed his transcription of “La Béatitude,” by another French Baroque composer, Charles Piroye.

Organ nerds in this town presently have much to be thankful for.

To-Doings:

When Spencer Barnitz shows up with his band Spencer the Gardener at SOhO tonight, it will be more than just a gig or a screening. Expect a real/real encounter, as Robert Redfield’s fascinating 2023 documentary re: Barnitz, More Than Just a Party Band, enjoys a rare club-based screening, with the band in its pumping, grooving live glory in house.