ON the Beat | Ventura Calling, with Serious Music Business

Beijing Guitar's Yameng Wang, left, and Meng Su | Photo: Sophie Zhai

Back in the roaring ‘90s, my steadiest source of writerly employment was the Los Angeles Times, including a steady beat down Ventura way. The Times’s site-specific “Ventura edition” was a noble and useful decade-long experiment serving that county, for which I covered music, art, and occasionally architecture. This was before the arrival of slash and burning new CEO Mark H. Willes (known affectionately as “Cap’n Crunch,” for his previous job shaking up General Foods), and the excising of Ventura and Valley editions, along with the infamous Staples Center boondoggle (New York Times link).

But I digress into the endless saga of newspaper-war story slinging, all too relevant at the moment.

One of the significant developments and new cultural projects during my tenure in Ventura was the birth of the idealistic and ambitious Ventura Music Festival (VMF), an annual tapestry of events and concerts around the town, with classical music as its central focus. In the beginning, conductor and classical music force around town Burns Taft was its director, when the festival’s full title was the Ventura Chamber Music Festival. The “chamber” element was dropped in its 10th anniversary edition, when violinist and Mehta family offspring Nuvi Mehta assumed the director mantle.

Genre-wise, the festival has stuck to its classical music agenda while organically folding in “other” serious music elements from the jazz world, with Herbie Hancock, Chris Botti, Sérgio Mendes, and other important artists having graced VMF stages.

This year, the VMF — which has gone through the usual growing pains and up/down rhythmic cycles over the years — celebrates its grand 30th birthday, all grown up now and with some places to go. This weekend’s slate of music, all at Ventura College, provides a telling cross-section of enticements between Ventura/Santa Barbara-born neo-swingsters Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at Ventura College on Friday, July 25; the jazz legend-in-the-making Joshua Redman and his quartet at the College on Saturday, July 26; and the bedazzling and sensitive double-headed classical guitar sensation the Beijing Guitar Duo (hear ‘em here) on Sunday at 2 p.m. For festival continuity’s sake, violinist and former VMF domo Mehta appears in a Sunday morning recital.

These days, the prospect of trekking to Ventura — and the increasingly hip-ifying burg of Ojai — is a steady lure for music-seeking Santa Barbarans, with programming along pop ‘n’ roll and indie music lines. Making the half hour drive to venues including the Ventura Theater and Ventura Music Hall to catch acts of note is worth the effort (of course, for Los Angelenos, a half hour drive ain’t nothing). On classical and more serious musical fronts, heading to our Southern sibling in the tri county’s geo-family is a less common affair, but this weekend is a welcome exception.

For one, the chance to hear tenor saxist Redman in the 805 is a treasurable one: He last played in this town a decade ago, at the Lobero Theatre, and demonstrated then why he was a major dude in jazz cosmos. That was before he ventured into such memorable projects as the Still Dreaming band, with the now belated trumpeter Ron Miles, drummer Brian Blade, and bassist Scott Colley. The band paid tribute to Joshua’s formidable father, Dewey, and the post–Ornette Coleman band New and Old Dreams. Joshua’s latest phase, as a Blue Note recording artist, continues the legacy which began, once genetically removed, with Dewey.

Classical Worldly Kid’s Stuff, and Not

Saturday morning passersby on the corner of Canon Perdido and Anacapa were greeted by an unusual sound: the friendly chaotic jumble of drumming, horns, and other implements of musical enactment. Children gathered on the Lobero Theatre esplanade were making a delightful, innocent avant-kinder noise, courtesy of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s roving Music Van and its “Instrument Exploration Station.”

It was a fitting preamble to the Music Academy of the West’s (MAW) delectable family-friendly presentation of Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev’s famed “young person’s guide to the orchestra” — a k a “symphonic tale for children.” Adult appreciation was also generously included in an expectedly polished performance by the Academy Festival Orchestra, conducted by César Cañón.

Narration in Spanish — the Pedro y el Lobo component of the show — was provided by Luis Moreno, while Michael Boudewyns lent both narration and acting/pantomime services in telling Peter/Pedro’s tale. The Maine-based Boudewyns, working with his director wife Sara Valentine, concocted an entertaining and tightly synced, tale-spinning scheme involving such common retooled props as suitcases, a purse, a plunger, and a hatrack. Touché, on several fronts.

Beyond the renewable pleasure of a beautifully baked version of Peter and the Wolf — a pleasure in the listening and in sharing the audience with a crown packed with fresh young ears — the morning program also fed us another tasty orchestral morsel, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s “Four Dances” from Estancia. It’s a compact but juicy number, full of the composer’s signature rhythmic and harmonic rigor, with tart Stravinsky-esque dissonances and cadences, mixed with indigenous Argentine musical spice rack adornments.

Looking at the MAW calendar this week, a relative breather is in order in the eight-week schedule, after last week’s dense ticket thicket featuring Jeremy Denk’s stunning three-nighter on the theme of Beethoven Sonatas and the notably potent and moving, fully-staged opera production of Don Giovanni at the Granada over the weekend. Still, there are plenty of live music and master class options to indulge in, as seen here.

To-Doings:

The big news on the Santa Barbara Bowl front this week goes down tonight, July 24, when masterful and iconoclastic art pop prankster Father John Misty returns to the stage, along with no less an American icon than Lucinda Williams opening the show. Ever the Bowl bridesmaid/opener and not yet the bride/headliner, Lucinda has now famously opened for a number of male marquee artists, including Willie Nelson and John Fogerty. And now … the good “Father.”