Voice in Her Own Woods
In the barn, lights are low and the calming atmosphere in soft-edged yet quirky space set the stage for the promised magic to happen. This evening’s magician/musician in the spotlight and at the controls is Jennifer Terran, longtime Santa Barbara singer-songwriter and carver of her own artistic destiny.
Proudly and defiantly going the DIY route, she has made evocative independent albums stretching back to the 1997 debut Cruel up through 2023’s fine California National Anthem, and including the feisty experimental 2001 album The Musician — an artful thumb of the nose at the record business establishment. (Listen here.)
Meanwhile, she has played European cafés and house concerts and stirred up a cult audience, well giving occasional up close and rustically personal local showings in the venue known as “the barn.”
We got a good taste of the magic last Friday. And lo, it was a good and happy and strange thing to behold. At root, Terran delivers her sampler of treats from her growing songbook at the grand piano — which she plays beautifully — but this concert context turns more toward the sense of a happening. She engaged the congregation by first asking each person to state what they expected from the evening and had them pick out slips of paper from a special bowl marked with songs for her to play. Among the highlights among the un-bowled songs: a fitting opener, “Life Untamed” (“come on play, come on play … at my house”) and “All, Be Your Wave” — from the latest album — and her wowing take on Prince’s “Purple Rain.”
At one point, she played a folk-punky version of “The God We Trust” (“Soon, more fire trucks / no more chances”) on the bass strings of an out-of-tune guitar. At another moment, she handed an in-tune guitar to this scribe, enlisting me to improvise a background for her clever tech-wary “Don’t Put the Chip in Your Brain.” A country lope in the key of C seemed to work, with the help of hand percussion by Daniel Wilson.
It’s hard to put Terran in a neat box or way of musical being, bless her heart wondering brain. Parallels with Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and Sinead O’Connor may hover in the air, but she functions in a creative world of her own, around some personally fashioned Artpop-esque qualities meet passages of pure pop emotions, sideswiped by raw anger and asymmetrical song forms. You gotta love it. Vulnerable emotional moments wend through her songbook, but she is resistant to easy solutions to problems, as a songwriter or a human. Songs often end on a suspended note or a surprise stowaway chord.
In the closing song of her show, “America,” things suddenly swerve into a new darker key on the word “America,” with the key line sneaking in at songs end: “America, unrequited love / Why can you hear me only when I’m happy?”
Terran’s magic box is a cabinet of small, strange wonders, broaching matters of happiness, outrage, nature-worship, compassion large and small and assorted creative loop-de-loops, all conjured up in an active brain and, once in a while, in a mellowing barn.
Jensen’s Reborn, Learning Center Division
Jensen’s Music lives on! Well, to clarify, the component of the locally and nationally known music store haven of Jensen’s — which closed last year after more than 50 years of service — is reborn in terms of its music lesson resource. On Saturday afternoon, the slice of the store real estate dedicated to lessons had a grand reopening, unveiling an impressive makeover after many months of slow but steady renovation work (link).
On hand were dedicated resident teachers Laura Nelson, Josh Jenkins, Mike Shifflett, and Tompeet Frederiksen — the principal spearhead for the place’s revival and now survival. Also in the house was guitarist Michael Frey, a former teacher here for 30-plus years, who mentioned that his student body included Glen Phillips (Toad the Wet Sprocket) and Chris Shiflett (Foo Fighters). On Saturday in the parking lot across the way from Grocery Outlet (the beloved “Gross Out”), the fine guitarist-singer John Lyle, former teacher and employee here, serenaded with doses of “Blackbird” and “Running on Empty,” in fresh open tuning versions, and, most impressively, a solo guitar and voice rendition of Steely Dan’s chordally complex “Deacon Blues.”
Between this location and the newcomer music store and teaching spot that is Riviera Music, Santa Barbara’s music store vacuum appears to have been granted a reprieve by the brick-and-mortar music hub muse.
Blue Thursday Alert
The Santa Barbara Blues Society is on the verge of its truly milestone 50th anniversary in the business of bringing top notch and world class blues to our fabled beach town. Who woulda thunk it? In the lead-up, the next show on the books features accoladed Chicagoan Nick Moss and band, in the old familiar and beloved location of the Carrillo Recreation Center, but on a different kind of night for an SBBS show — Thursday, September 24, versus the usual Saturday night fever slot.
Moss, recipient of 15 Blues Music Awards and an Alligator Records artist, promises to deliver a hot and blues-steamed evening.
The Sound and Feel of Meditation
“Music and Meditation,” a series which launched its second season last week at the Music Academy of the West, neatly describes its MO with its title. On a deeper level, the subtitle could be “music is meditation is music.” That premise is being put to the test and made manifest in this, organized by pianist and Antonio Artese and popular meditation leader Jessica Kolbe, with a rotating cast of guests in the music portion of the program.
Last Friday afternoon in Weinman Hall, the musician du jour was Robert Demaine, principal cellist of the L.A. Phil, opening beautifully with a sprig of Bach Cello Suite content — the Saraband from suite number three. Artese joined him for another categorically meditative choice, the hauntingly sublime and deceptively simple “Spiegel im Spiegel” (“mirror in mirror”), by the great “holy minimalist” Arvo Pärt — who was turning 91 on that day. This rightly famed piece recently touched our ears and souls in Santa Barbara recently in one of the Music Academy’s events at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art this summer, when violinist Lily Sullivan performed it while moving dreamily around the gallery. It’s one of those magical small but mighty works of music that takes you to a place of its own devising.
Said place was such a highlight of the program that the remainder— including short works by Chopin, Faure, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, a solid neo-romantic piece by Artese himself, and a bonbon of “Cinema Paradiso” — felt like a string of afterthoughts.
One takeaway of this interesting new concept of a series is to point up the inevitably subjective matter of which music best serves that elusive meditative character. It depends on one’s tastes and perspective: to these ears, Bach and Pärt, and more generally, early music, minimalism and impressionist sounds suit that function best. Taste and mileage may differ.
The series continues to chart its happy and peacemaking path. Coming up: with Nancy Mathison, clarinet, on Friday, October 23; violinist Savannah Jo Lack on Friday, November 13; and violist Kate Vincent on Friday, December 11.
TO-DOINGS:
This weekend marks the season-launch for the ever-popular and ever-inviting, Adam Phillips–founded and -led Santa Barbara Folk Orchestra, at the Presidio, St. Mark’s, and Trinity Church. On the menu this time out: The Sixties!
Meanwhile, the Santa Barbara Bowl season carries on, on a roll, following fab recent shows by Johnny Blues Skies and legend Santana. Great American music continues, with sophistosoul masters Earth, Wind & Fire on Friday, September 18, and young sensation Freya Skye on Saturday.
Another Bowl, another strong season of music: Ojai’s Libbey Bowl, which came alive with jazz last Saturday with Kamasi Washington, settles into a definitely Big Weekend on hard-to-define but undeniably powerful terms, with the eagerly-awaited arrival of Big Thief, on both Saturday and Sunday.
In clubland, SOhO’s weekly roster features the dazzling young newcomer to the virtuoso ukulele scene, Feng E., on Saturday.
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