Purcell-Mania Moment
Reports of “adventurous programming” in classical music are often shorthand for putatively daring forays into contemporary music, in a musical atmosphere generally leaning back in music history. It was a different story with the “adventurous programming” filling Trinity Lutheran Church last Saturday afternoon.
Before an SRO crowd, the Santa Barbara Master Chorale(SBMC) dared to take a serious and fully committed turn way backwards, to the music of 17th-century English composer Henry Purcell, the Baroque-era master whose music deserves wider public hearings. Welcome to the all-Purcell roster of the cheekily named Purcell-a-Palooza, designed and conducted by the group’s new director, William Cutter, who migrated westward to Santa Barbara after an extended and illustrious career in Boston. (See Madeline Slogoff’s story here).
Saturday’s concert did, indeed, prove to be an adventure, in which the participants on all sides of the stage survived and thrived. It was, among other things, a refreshing departure in a region wanting for Baroque music. (Digressional head’s up: Baroque fans should mark their calendars for Les Arts Florissant, a Monteverdi-palooza coming to the Lobero Theatre on November 15.)
SBMC’s Purcell program included shorter, interstitial instrumental works — the fizzy opening appetizer of “Fantasia Upon One Note” and a Rondeau, incidental music for the play Abdelazer (the Moor’s Revenge). But the main events featured choral forces and notable soloists. Purcell’s celebrated opera Dido and Aeneas (which was presented in full by the UCSB Music Department in 2007) arrived via a selected sampling of Overture and Choruses, and the group also laid into the celebratory tapestry of “Come Ye Songs of Art (Birthday Ode to Queen Mary).”
Subtle staging and dance elements were worked into the performance, featuring dancers Evelyn Mills, Summer Fowler, and Nik Valinsky, and talent from the high school level (sounding very post-high school) included Lillian Joiner and Noelle Hadsell, who we also know as a strong pianist. In Dido, the voices came courtesy of sopranos Sharlae Jenkins and Cari Voth, and baritone Phillip Brandel’s comic relief contrasted the mournful gravitas (an emotional character well served in Baroque settings) of “Dido’s Lament,” passionately delivered by noted mezzo-soprano Julie Davies, partially on her knees.
In all, this impressive concert implicitly argued the case for giving Purcell a brighter spotlight in the ranks of programmable composers, in this town and beyond. To boot, it served as a salutary debut for the now unfolding Cutter-era SBMC.
Where Jazz Spices and Friendly Hip-Hop Manners Meet
Alto saxist Terrace Martin, headed to Campbell Hall on Friday, November 6, is being billed by hosting UCSB Arts & Lectures as part of its jazz sub-series in the season. In fact, it should more accurately be called “jazz-adjacent,” given Martin’s party-timing leaning towards hip hop influences, R&B grooves, and smatterings of soul-basted vocals and rap lite.
The term could seem dismissive, as a heads-up for jazz fans seeking a good more traditionally jazz-fueled reason to go out. But it also sends a message to listeners who like more groove and soulful vibes in their definition of jazz, a growing contingent of listeners drawn to such hip hop-lined jazz players as Robert Glasper, who brought his jazz-adjacent party posse to the Lobero Theatre last year.
Martin’s story begins, in part, in the legendary jazz-grooming laboratory of Billy Higgins’s World Stage, in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles, along with musicians including Kamasi Washington. Like sometime-collaborator Washington, Martin found himself working with artists across the jazz and hip-hop/R&B divide, including Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, and Snoop Dogg. Influences of all of those artists, and more, can be detected in Martin’s discography, most recently on his new album, Watchu Bringing? (hear here), also featuring his friends Washington and Glasper.
Watchu bringing to Campbell Hall? Our advice: Bring your jazz-content-sniffing brain but don’t forget your dancing shoes. (Listen to an interview with Martin on A&L’s Air Time podcast here.)
On Grand on State: Tom Scott and Symphonic Tendrils
This week’s big news in the centrally located jazz hub of Grand on State is the return of alto saxist and Hollywood-aligned Tom Scott. Scott kicked off the club’s “visiting artist” series in a duo with Roger Kelloway in May and returns with the fine pianist Lawrence Hobgood — best known for his long affiliation with preeminent jazz vocalist Kurt Elling — on Friday, October 30.
Things keep hopping and happening in this young space, including last Saturday’s close encounter with the Grand’s next-door neighbor, The Granada Theatre. In an early set, the spotlight was on good-beyond-their-years high-school-aged musicians, pianist Lucian Dempsey and mainstream jazz guitarist Adam Kabaretti — yes, that Kabaretti, son of Santa Barbara symphony maestro Nir Kabaretti, who was at that time about to start his own gig at the Granada, counting off Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and kicking off the Symphony’s new season. Clearly, the musical gene pool at the Kabaretti household is strong and deep.
The Grand–Granada connection continued after the symphony concert, when virtuoso pianist Michelle Cann showed up in the club with trumpeter/music publisher Dorian Mohar, along with their infant son, Michael (“he’s the star of the show,” says Mohar). Mohar sat in with the band to the tune of “Tangerine” and “Bye Bye Blackbird,” completing a circle of Grand-meets-Granada inter-webbing. May that continue.
TO-DOINGS:
Two recommended musical doings this week at SOhOrepresent varied ends of theinstrumental music spectrum: French guitarist Pierre Bensusan, one of the most prized acoustic guitarists on the scene and the “king of DADGAD” (the popular open tuning), returns to the venue on Sunday, as part of his The Infinite Guitar tour; and the always impressive Santa Barbara City College “Monday Madness” Jazz Orchestra, this town’s baddest, most prime-timing jazz big band vehicle, shows up on, of course, Monday. A great, swinging way to start the week, that.
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