Tag archives: musicians
Livingston Taylor is just two years younger than his famous rock star brother James, and two years behind him in launching his solo singer-songwriter career. Both have written truly memorable songs, including early efforts about growing up in North Carolina, although both returned to their native Boston area early in adulthood and still maintain homes […]
CAMA – Community Arts Music Association – hosted its latest Masterseries concert at the Lobero when violinist Anne Akiko Meyers showed off her undoubted talents. The hugely entertaining program, with Grammy nominee Meyers, 54, playing her 1741 “ex-Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesu, included Corelli’s “La Folia Sonata,” Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 5 in F Major ‘Spring,’” Lauridsen’s […]
For some reason, UCSB Arts & Lectures has decided to open its season on a mocking note dripping with sarcasm. Make that a lot of notes, as Snarky Puppy arrives at the Arlington Theatre on Tuesday, October 1, to kick off the 2024-25 slate of events. Not that the Texas-bred quasi-collective that boasts around 25 […]
By 1973 I had a red Panasonic ball radio parked in the darkened little hutch that was built into the headboard of my bed, and was discovering both the inchoate power of music, and words like ‘inchoate’. I’d bought my first LP with my own money, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, played McCartneys’ RAM album till […]
The Santa Barbara Acoustic Instrument Celebration launched as an annual guitar convention back in 2016, branched into presenting a series of concerts that included workshops, and arguably peaked with bringing fingerstyle wizard Tommy Emmanuel back to town. But when the pandemic struck in 2020, it was hard to get audiences to return, and after trying […]
Fret not that the Music Academy summer festival 2024 came to a close last weekend with the triumphant fellows-powered orchestra concert of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 6.” Classical music abounds in the upcoming 2024-25 season, everything from touring major orchestras to intimate recitals at venues all over town. Camerata Pacifica launches its series back at Hahn […]
Clarinet fellow Katia Sofia Waxman is winding up her first and likely only summer at the Music Academy of the West after earning a master’s degree from Juilliard while majoring in both music and economics at Oberlin. The Chicago native said she was lucky to get to attend the “pinnacle summer festival” for its faculty […]
If you somehow missed Mezcal Martini at their romp through the July calendar of free outdoor concerts – including Music at the Ranch, Concerts in the Park, and Meet Me in Old Town Goleta – you’ve got another chance this week as the Latin jazz band heads to Fiesta’s Mercado De La Guerra for a […]
I talked with Tommy Faragher this week about his band, The Faragher Brothers, who will be doing a two-night residency at the Alcazar Theatre, Carpinteria, August 9 and 10. The original band was formed in the 1970s up in Redlands, CA by four brothers, Tommy, Davey, Jimmy,and Danny Faragher. While their long history in the […]
Bill Lanphar wasn’t the best-known singer-songwriter-guitarist who called Santa Barbara home. But he might very well have been the best-loved among his peers. Lanphar, who had a rock band when he lived in L.A. before relocating to Santa Barbara and La Conchita, started playing music during open mic nights at Dargan’s Pub and quickly became […]
Continue motoring down the 101 this weekend for more musical adventures, including the first installment of the 2024 Ventura Music Festival, the seaside city’s long-running boundary-busting fest that extends to various venues and genres. Grammy winner and 12-time IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year Michael Cleveland brings boffo bluegrass to Olivas Adobe Historical Park with […]
Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, 71, former musical director of the Seoul Philharmonic, was in fine form at the Granada when he led the Academy Festival Orchestra in its first performance of the summer festival season. The highly entertaining concert opened with Wagner’s Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. and Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, concluding […]
Concerts in the Park is a long-cherished Santa Barbara institution, a summertime frolic featuring free live music on the Great Meadow in Chase Palm Park along Santa Barbara’s waterfront on Cabrillo Blvd. The gently-sloping hill facing the permanent concrete stage (often the setting for weddings and other private functions) provides sensational sightlines and surroundings with […]
The ever-entertaining Takács Quartet was in superb form at the sold out Lobero as they performed in the first week of the Music Academy of the West’s 77th Summer Festival. The Fab Four – violinists Edward Dusinberre and Harumi Rhodes, cellist András Fejér, and Grammy-winning violist Richard O’Neill, formerly with Camerata Pacifica – are currently […]
Normally at this time of year, UCSB Music’s voice program would either mount a full-scale opera or a collection of staged opera scenes, but for 2024, the show has morphed into an Opera Gala, which is not only a collaboration between the music and theater-dance departments, but also a tale of two cities as UCSB […]
Kenny Lee Lewis, bassist and backup singer for the Steve Miller Band since the early 1980s, has put together a five-piece band called THE FRENZ and secured half a dozen special guest singers and musicians with decades of combined rock history for a tribute show at the iconic Fillmore West in San Francisco and its […]
The Sphinx Organization was founded in Detroit back in 1997, and much like Motown Records more than three decades earlier, it has championed composers and musicians of color – in this case in the realm of classical music. Sphinx’s vision for more than three decades has been to make classical music more representative of our […]
Camerata Pacifica’s 2023-24 season continues at Hahn Hall on March 15 with a trio of seminal chamber works that evince the link between composers Brahms, Schoenberg and Pärt. Violinist Abigél Králik, who one critic praises as “a shooting star in the truest sense of the word,” makes her Camerata Pacifica debut on the program, which […]
The only active-duty Air Force band west of the Rockies energized audiences at two free performances on Feb. 27 at Westmont and Montecito Covenant Church. The United States Air Force Band of the Golden West Winds woodwind dectet performed several patriotic and classical pieces, including one song that featured kazoos to the delight of the […]
Programming an event during SBIFF can be an iffy affair, but booking The Beatles would seem to stand a pretty good chance of success. The Fab Four of course aren’t showing up, but the producers of 60 Years of Beatlemania! have come up with the next best thing. Make that “things”, plural. The February 9 […]
