ON the Beat | Viva la MAW and Mariachi

Majo Aguilar | Credit: Courtesy

Once you get over, or briefly set aside, the moral quandary built into Old Spanish
Days — a celebration of the Spanish conquest of California at the expense of Mexican and indigenous cultures — it is possible to enjoy the festive spirit of Viva la Fiesta. There are plenty of activities, dance and music options, and edibles to enjoy throughout the weekend.

Every year, though, one of my favorite events of the weekend is unofficial: the fiesta-adjacent Mariachi Festival at the Santa Barbara Bowl, playing for five hours of high-grade mariachi this Saturday, August 8.

Not only is the festival, now in its 29th year, one of the premier such events in the country, but on the community front it is also a fundraiser for scholarships for Latino students. Checking out this festival is a handy way to gauge the state of mariachi at large. Headlining this year’s program are Majo Aguilar and Joss Favela. The five-hour spectacular also includes the ever-popular Mariachi Los Camperos, Mariachi Nuevo Mujer 2000, Ángel Mendoza, Alessandra Gutierrez, and Kaylanie Barrera.

Viva La Mariachi festival! ¡Viva La Fiesta!

ON the MAW Beat

Mariana Iguavita and Lily Sulliva, Santa Barbara Museum of Art | Photo: Josef Woodard

Looking over the cultural goods and services supplied by the mighty Music Academy of the West (MAW) last week, the high point clearly went down at the Granada on Saturday, with an Academy Festival Orchestra performance featuring the entrancing new-ish Samuel Adams “Piano Concerto” No Such Spring (review to come). Doing the solo honors was MAW’s own Conor Hanick, who premiered the piece three years ago with the San Francisco Symphony, and the orchestra was up to its usual high standards, led through the Adams and Sibelius Third Symphony in a hearty night of orchestral satisfaction.

But among other MAW doings last week, some of the memorable moments came “off-campus,” in Santa Barbara, proper. On Friday at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, we heard the second of three in the series called Beyond Conversation: Dialogues in Music through Art, with fellows performing amid and in inspirational correlation with the art in the gallery. Friday’s sold-out event was highlighted by deeply moving and site-sensitive readings of Kaija Saariaho’s tersely poetic Changing Light, for violin (Lily Sullivan), soprano (Mariana Iguavita), and the ever-magical Arvo Pärt classic Spiegel im Spiegel.

In this version, with Miyabi Henriksen as the passionate, circumambulating violinist and Pei-Tsun Chiang on digital “faux” piano, the meditative pull of the score itself was aided by Henriksen’s directed bonding with an artwork in-house, the reclining sculpture of Alison Saar’s 1991 Terra Firma.

Christopher Cerrone piece, Music Academy of the West at the Santa Barbara Public Library | Photo: Josef Woodard

Saturday afternoon in the plaza of the Santa Barbara Public Library, evocative visiting composer Christopher Cerrone’s fresh piece The Only Way is Through made its second appearance, after the West Coast premiere the day before in a garden at the Miraflores campus. Cerrone, whose music often involves minimalist concepts and an embrace of atmosphere, has created a work for percussion and young voices (here, the gifted, Erin McKibben–directed Sing! group, with singers as young as seven). The effect was transfixing, with a quality of meshing and texturizing reminiscent of Steve Reich, as in pieces such as Tehillim.

We had heard Cerrone’s music as well on Thursday night programs at Hahn Hall, including the suspended emotional animation of his piece Why Was I Born Between Mirrors last week. (That program also featured the West Coast premiere of Joel Thompson’s alluring On Mars, with mezzo-soprano Maiya Williams joined by violist Milan Milisavljević and pianist Tamar Sanikidze).

Brass at the Bandshell | Photo: Josef Woodard

Sunday afternoon brought the second annual Brass @ the Bandshell concert to the resuscitated Plaza del Mar bandshell, a hop and a skip from the ocean, basking in a timeless, century-plus-old atmosphere. A healthy crowd, including families, showed up for some seriously well-played brass music, adorned with fringe enticements of face-painting, an instrument playground, “bubble man,” and yes, free McConnell’s ice cream.

This event, one of the bright new features in the academy roster, evokes an odd sense of borrowed nostalgia, for a time 100-and-more years ago, when brass bands played in park bandstands as a matter of course, including this one. Memories are made of this, and re-channeled, sometimes mischievously, as in the pile-up music of iconoclastic yet sentimental Charles Ives.

No Ivesian mischief was to be heard on Sunday, but we got to dive into the niche world of brass music and composers most of us hadn’t yet heard of. Highlights included the apt opener, Eric Ewazen’s A Western Fanfare (commissioned by MAW for its 50th anniversary in 1997) and Enrique Crespo’s spicy Suite Americana — dealing with America in the larger, continental sense, vs. the ethnocentric U.S.-focused sense. Later music leaned into slighter fare, but there was enough substance — not to mention stellar performances by the ensembles, led by department head Weston Sprott, to appeal to the mind and ear on this lovely Sunday affair.

And the taste buds: Did we mention free McConnell’s ice cream? It was a nice bit of locally angled icing on the experience.

One thing missing from this Summer’s edition of MAW was the by-now-anticipated fix of Jeremy Denk. The rightly famed and slyly witty pianist has become an annual high point of Santa Barbara’s classical year since joining the Academy faculty and bringing us impressive recitals — themed and otherwise. This year’s recital was canceled due to illness that beset the pianist upon arrival in town, making 2026 a Denk-less year, recital-wise, in these parts.

But not entirely Denk-less. There is a last chance to hear Denk tonight, August 6, at the Lobero Theatre, as part of the “Teaching Artist Showcase” program, palpating the ivories to the tune of piano quintets by Dmitri Shostakovich and Reynaldo Hahn.

And then there was Denk, the unique, firm, but gentle and wit-handy master class giver, performing for the edutainment benefit of young fellows and often generally not-so-young audience members. Last week, he gave the second of two such master classes. He drilled down into the details of the music of Scriabin (played by Adrian King), Debussy (Rowan Sawarna-Small), and Beethoven (Chih-Yun Hsiao). All of the pianists were highly accomplished and engaging to hear.

But wait, Denk implicitly said, there are fine points and coarse points of interpretation to consider. At one point, he confessed, between his dancing-in-his-seat enthusiasm, “I’m being overly nitpicky — that’s what they pay me to do.” To King, the teacher talked about Scriabin’s “ecstatic, tumultuous, vertiginous” qualities, and posed the question: “How do you successfully navigate ecstasy?” He added, “you’re doing it like an enemy to be conquered,” but praised his organization (“it makes me jealous”).

With the Debussy, Denk noted that this music should be “nonchalantly gracious,” and that at times, the pianist had a bit too much “German sauce on the Spanish tapas.” Later, he mentioned that the interpretation “sounds a little blurry, to me, for Spain. It sounds a little under-amorous.”

As for Hsiao’s Beethoven, he was suitably impressed, but noted: “I feel like the dust cover is still on the furniture … can I pay you $10 to play a little less pedal?” But clearly, the teacher greatly respected the high levels of musicianship of these fellows, professional nit-picking aside.

To come: The academy festival big top rolls up its tent this weekend, but there remain two major events — the orchestra series finale at the Granada on Saturday, featuring Mozart and Rachmaninoff, conducted by David Danzmayr, and the fund-raising Gala on Friday, August 14, with Audra McDonald in the musical spotlight.

Local Jazz Club History Housekeeping

Nick Welsh did an excellent job of giving the full story (and backstory) of the ambitious new club sensation in town, Grand on State, a venue helping to make live music safe again in our town (story here). The good stuff continues, with Santa Barbara artists and a growing list of well-known visiting artists — check out Ernie Watts (Quartet West, “Tonight show” band), this Saturday, the great drummer and bandleader Peter Erskine (with fine west coast players, pianist Alan Pasqua and bassist Darek Oles) on Saturday, August 29 and Miles Davis tribute-making trumpeter Terell Stafford, on Wednesday, September 9.

Welsh’s story also made brief mention of past jazz club culture in town, which seems to deserve further fleshing out, for the sake of the history books and because … why not? For starters, the most legendary example is the miraculous, small-but-mighty 50-seater room on Victoria Street, known as Jazz Hall, led by the stubbornly intrepid Ridah Omri in the 1990s. Somehow, in the few years of its existence, it managed to host shows by the stellar likes of Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jack DeJohnette, Elvin Jones, Brad Mehldau, Kenny Garrett, Kenny Kirkland (shortly before his death), and Greg Osby. (Somebody told me that Ernie Watts also played there).

Curiosity feeding curiosity as it does, I reached out to Omri himself, who had a list of additions to the list: Wallace Roney, Kenny Barron, Eddy Harris, Ravi Coltrane, Delfeayo Marsalis, Billy Higgins, Nicholas Payton, Buddy Collette, Herbie Mann, Nneena Freelon … the mind boggles as do the memories.

Deeper into history, there was the mythic Spigot, on De la Vina, where Yellow Belly is now. The artist roster in that not-so-humble spot includes the following (this list was partly thanks to my new friend Claude): Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, Cal Tjader, Louis Armstrong, Prince Lasha, Sonny Simmons, Shelly Manne, Billy Higgins, and more.

And this is not at all to discount the flow of good jazz, local and beyond, presented at SOhO for decades. Memory doesn’t serve as well as it used to. Still, I remember great nights there, hearing the great Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson, maverick alto saxist Tim Berne, Les McCann, Bill Frisell, and Bad Plus (on a very rare night when the trio turned duo due to bassist Reid Anderson’s arm injury).

The jazz beat goes on in Santa Barbara, in syncopated waves. Long may it.

TO-DOINGS:

Two prominent female artists, from then and now, seize the spotlight in the coming week: bluegrass rising star Sierra Ferrell at the Bowl tonight, and singer-songwriter veteran Shawn Colvin at the Lobero Theatre on Sunday (see Leslie Dinaberg’s interview here).