ON the Beat | Further Adventures on the Miles-Coltrane Trail

Ernie Watts performing at Grand on State on August 8 | Photo: Josef Woodard

Like many, I got my first taste of tenor saxist Ernie Watts’s steamy goodness in 15-second snippets. As one of the strong contenders making the Johnny Carson–era “Tonight Show” big band TV’s baddest and boldest nightly music source, Watts could be heard blowing his considerable stuff (next to another great West Coast tenor man, Pete Christlieb) in bite-sized micro-solos, segueing in and out of commercials.

As it turns out, I and the world have heard him without knowing it. He toured with the Rolling Stones, played on Frank Zappa’s The Grand Wazoo (as the “mystery horn”), and, as one of the better saxists calling Los Angeles home, he was a busy session player who put his stamp on many (that’s him on Glenn Frey’s “The One You Love,” f’rinstance).

Jazz-wise, showing his true colors and lineage, he gained a more proper high profile as the horn voice in Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, which played the Lobero Theatre a few times.

And he made his first visit to Santa Barbara’s special new cultural attraction, the Grand on State (GoS), last Saturday, playing a sold-out show and the second official date in the jejune club’s “visiting artists” series. For this occasion, Watts — who has been hanging his hat and sax at home in Cambria for many years — worked with a band of locals, being ace front-line foil trumpeter Jeff Elliott (Watts joked “we are partners in … trouble”), bassist Randy Tico, drummer Dick Weller, and Tom Gastineau on the in-house “grand.”

Duty bound, I couldn’t miss the swan song concert of this summer’s Music Academy of the West festival — a Mozart/Rachmaninoff program by the Academy Festival Orchestra — at the virtually next-door venue of The Granada Theatre, but I hated to miss a chance to hear Watts in this intimate space. The solution: Catch it in snatches, before and during intermission.

Turns out that this performance arrived with a theme in tow, as another entry in this year’s many tributes to the serendipitously timed shared centennial year of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane — both of whom changed the face of modern jazz. As Watts told the SRO crowd, “these two men revolutionized the music. They changed the way we hear music and influenced a lot of people — musicians and otherwise.”

Ernie Watts performing at Grand on State on August 8 | Photo: Josef Woodard

Earlier this year, Santa Barbara hosted tributes of varying hues and artistic success by Terence Blanchard, Ravi Coltrane, and Emmet Cohen. Watts is well-suited and well-informed on the subject as a pan-idiomatic player who can sincerely “go there,” to such places as R&B swagger, swing, and Coltrane-ish abandon.

Beginning, in an open-spaced but solid way, was “Footprints,” Wayne Shorter’s classic immortalized by Miles’s quintet, with Elliott and Watts serving as the trumpet-tenor allies. They get along well, with bits of dialogue and harmony along their dual path. Watts issued steamy sheets of sound between more focused lines, a balancing act which we heard further on “On Green Dolphin Street.” The call of Mozart-Rach pulled me away, but reliable sources and kindly supplied video evidence informed me that the setlist included the great Coltrane tunes “Giant Steps” and “Naima,” “So What,” “Impressions,” and Davis’s “All Blues” — all leaning towards the earlier, pre-electric, and pre-“spiritual jazz” phases of the tributed artists’ arcs, but always worth vehicles to revisit by jazz musicians with their lights and radar on.

On the horizon at the Grand on State are evenings with local stalwarts Brian Mann, Lois Mahalia, Teka, and Colin Richardson, among others, and more “visiting artists” in store: Master drummer Peter Erskine and trio (pianist Alan Pasqua and bassist Darek Oles) on Saturday, August 29, and trumpeter Terrell Stafford (also supplying a Miles tribute), on September 9. Keep an eye and ear open: the GoS is a proven go-to.

Saturday Night Fiesta Fever

Banda La Reyna de Santa Barbara at Fiesta 2026 | Photo: Josef Woodard

Post-Rachmaninoff (and Watts) last Saturday night, the town was still jumping with Fiesta-phonic zeitgeist, and other sounds were beckoning from downtown. Just across the street in the Sunken Gardens, the perennial Las Noches de Ronda was still cranking up the spotlight on high-quality Mexican and flamenco music and dance.

By this point, the Mercado de la Guerra stage had stopped its shivering, but State Street — fully capitalizing on its status as an auto-traffic-free zone — had transformed into a happily chaotic fun zone. Sounds piled up, block by block and even in the same block, in the plunderphonic dogpile. Roving mariachi mixed it up and tried to compete with the louder and brasher blast of Banda and the border crosstalk of Tex-Mex and other hybrids, as hordes of revelers semi-danced, milled, and sometimes teetered up and down the boulevard.

Grupo la X-elencia at Fiesta 2026 |Photo: Josef Woodard

I wriggled between dancers to stand behind the trombonists and get immersed in the Banda sound of Banda La Reyna de Santa Barbara, while another group cooked up a happy-enough mixed marriage of Mexican and New Orleans ingredients, replete with a parade drum and tubby tuba. And then there was the hot young band called Grupo la X-elencia, sporting tight harmony vocals, thrumming drumming, and a wicked young accordionist putting his small white button accordion through some punkish and dazzling gymnastic paces.

Subtle? Nah. Life’s too short and Fiesta’s too hot for subtlety, but he did chew up the scenery in a gripping way.

ON the MAW Beat

Stephanie Blythe at Hahn Hall | Photo: Zach Mendez

We’ve come to the end of the line for this summer’s model of the beloved Music Academy of the West (MAW), apart from the Gala event on Friday, August 14 (a swanky occasion, not for the faint of wallet, but well-caused). For classical aficionados and newbies to the “serious music” world, it’s been a rich thrill ride of activity, concert action, master classes, visits from visiting composers (like Missy Mazzoli and Christopher Cerrone), and more to keep us off (and on) the streets for several weeks.

Last week’s final blast of action was topped off with the aforementioned finale orchestral concert (review to come), but there were other enticements, on and off the Montecitan Miraflores campus. The third of three concerts in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art called Beyond Conversation: Dialogues in Music Through Art (more please — this is a very good idea whose time has come) found musicians placed in assorted spots in the McCormick Gallery, an agenda “all about music in 360 degrees.” Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, nicely realized by tenor Dylan Schang with Raquel Nisi on harp, served as a foundation of the half-hour performance, around which were interspersed two works featuring fine young bassoonist Connor Chaffin and more Ravel — whose music seems naturally suited to art-referential settings — by John Michał Fawcett and pianist Hyunmin Gina Lee.

Daniel Danzmayr conducting AFO | Photo: Phil Channing

Thursday night at Hahn Hall, the spotlight turned on MAW’s famously strong voice department, with veteran mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe (a Mosher Guest this year) in the epicenter of the song-cycle Vignettes: Ellis Island, written for her by composer Alan Louis Smith. Songs about specific immigrants’ sagas of passing through Ellis Island proved musically fascinating and eerily touching as points of contrast to the current anti-immigrant fever sweeping certain quarters of today’s America (hopefully with a brighter tomorrow coming sooner than later).

The concert’s second half was a clever panorama of Tin Pan Alley–era songs, such as the new immigrants would have heard in the “land of the free.” Leading the pack of gifted fellow singers, Blythe kicked off with “It Had to be You” and returned to charm with “After You’ve Gone,” with highlights also including soprano Kate Fogg on “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” and baritone Daniel Byun on “April Showers.”

MAW 2026 is a wrap. The sound bite verdict: it delivered.

TO-DOINGS:

I was minding my own business, listening to KTYD one morning recently, and was distracted in the best way upon hearing a fresh and compelling voice in the blues-rock vein — voice as in what emerges from the mouth and the limber fingers of a good guitar player. Turns out, it was Davy Knowles, a musician known by those who know (including Peter Frampton and Joe Satriani), who is headed to play SOhO tonight, August 13. Check out the goods on his 2024 album, The Invisible Man (hear it here).