ON the Beat | So Good, So Far at SOhO

Dustbowl Revival | Photo: Courtesy

Santa Barbara’s live music calendar may be slow to rub out the sleep and the chill vibes in phase one of the new year. Our winter’s nap is only gradually abating. But this week’s dance card at SOhO, the city’s premiere showcase club, offers good reasons to get outta the house. It’s a good week for fans of Americana-soul, Indie lo-fi culture, and jazz songs well sung, courtesy of Dustbowl Revival (on Friday, January 9), Ariel Pink (Saturday), and jazz chanteuse Lee Hartley at Sunday afternoon’s convening of the monthly Santa Barbara Jazz Society.

Dustbowl Revival sees nothing wrong with blending aspects of Americana, indie manners, and horn-graced R&B mixed with New Orleans–iana and more (check it here). The band is also a testament to the power of grassroots and DIY machinations, having maintained its fanbase and self-driven evolution for 16 years. Among the L.A.-based band’s most clicked-upon tracks are the sweet-toned groover “Honey, I Love You” (with Keb’ Mo’ doing a cameo), the The Band–like “Beside You,” and “Debtors’ Prison.” And yes, that was fan Dick Van Dyke doing an old soft shoe at his own house, for the video of “Never Had to Go” (link).

The band summons up good vibe-ing American music, all around, something we desperately need at this mad moment.

A very different vibe will be at the club the next night. Is it true, in fact, that any publicity qualifies as good publicity? The jury is out when an artist becomes branded with active engagement in the January 6 insurrection. But there he is, Ariel Pink, who, after his MAGA-rific hijinx and unabashed post-tragedy responses, formed the project Ariel Pink’s Dark Side, and concocted the albums The Key of Joy is Disobedience and Never Made a Demo, Ever. He arrives at SOhO and on tour sans the dark side, but, in keeping with the idea of never making a demo, he still tends his more reputation as a pioneer of the lo-fi cosmos, heeding the up-the-industry and work-at-home ethic.

Now 47, the Los Angeles–based artist went to CalArts and has culled cult status through a string of albums going back to 1999’s aptly-named Underground, work for 4AD and stirring up controversy and bad boy habits into middle age. But the music speaks for itself: His new album, home-cooked as usual, is With You Every Night (listen here), an agreeable and cheesy cool mélange of tweaked pop cultural influences and art schooled attitude. From the album, his contrarian post-post-punk approach is tucked into the refrain on the deceptively chill “Everyone’s Wrong” as he purrs, “everyone’s fucking wrong,” on repeat.

Los Angeleno Hartley, bred in the family vein of gospel music, has circulated around the SoCal jazz scene, working on the big band scene and currently with ace pianist Christian Jacob and Tom Scott. She spent a decade working with Les McCann and his All-Star Friends, who lends his piano hipness to her 2013 album Whole Lotta’ Somethin’ (hear here). At SOhO, she’ll be joined by the stellar Santa Barbara–based guitarist Rob Moreno, heard around town with Matt Perko, Austin Beede, the Folk Orchestra of Santa Barbara (on bass), and elsewhere, as well as jazz-world connected drummer of choice Kevin Winard and L.A. bassist Stuart Eisler.

Catching Up with Loose 2025 Musical Ends: ECM Ahoy

Among the memorable musical moments of 2025 locally, and concert notes needing to be aired in this space, was the winter concert from the long-standing UCSB-based Ensemble for Contemporary Music (ECM). The group has been known to be representing the all-too-rare and necessary contemporary music contingency landing locally. Founded by composer/professor William Kraft, run by Jeremy Haladyna for many years, and Sarah Gibson briefly (before her untimely passing last year), ECM is currently helmed by director Jonathan Moerschel, a violist with the respected Calder Quartet. ECM’s winter concert at Lotte Lehmann (LL) Concert Hall offered much to admire, including a welcome emphasis on music by women composers.

The program opened with the accessible musical portal of Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 2 Company (scored for sextet) — Glass’ usual repetitive yada yada enchilada — but got immediately more intriguing with Jocelyn Morlock’s Blue Sun for Violin and Viola. Violinist Brian Hwang and violist Christian dos Santos (who may have been the concert’s MVP) delivered on the score’s attractive layout, slow and lyrical segueing into fast and furtive, in an assembly of short fragments.

Apart from Glass, the best-known composer on the docket was the inspiring young composer Ellen Reid, who Santa Barbarans may remember for her premiere of West Coast Sky Eternal with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at The Granada Theatre, and through the aegis of the Music Academy of the West. Déjà vu oozed into LL Concert Hall as ECM performed the string quartet version of West Coast Sky Eternal, which was premiered by the Kronos Quartet last year. Reportedly inspired by the skyline over L.A.’s Griffith Park, Reid’s piece, the highlight of this evening, is an evocative, free-floating piece, with collective glisses and a dreamy spirit, a neo-impressionistic canvas and without any easy -ism association.

Other bright stops on the ECM program included Amoret Abis’s When, with cellist protagonist Justin Kim taking the lead role in the score’s tense tonal and expressive language.

Naomi McGillivray’s Sounds of the Day found a quintet joined by narrator (Jennifer Kloetzel) wending through a notated score, producing an atonal and guided improvisational ensemble texture. Another larger grouping with the octet on Philip Cashian’s Mechanik, a driving work with a seductively ruffian energy, like a machine more well-intentioned than well-oiled. It served as a perfect concert endpiece, more a provocation than a grace note.

In short, contemporary music was alive and well and kicking on this December Wednesday night in the 805.

TO-DOINGS:

And tonight, January 8, for the first major musical event of this new year, Music Academy of the West’s Mariposa series features the super-trio likes of Edgar Meyer, Joshua Roman, and Tessa Lark at Hahn Hall. Expect crossed genres and musical gene pools, a place where classical training and impulses live happily aside bluegrassy root systems. (See story here).