ON the Beat | Hanging in the Jazz Speakeasy, Onstage

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This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on March 7, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

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Local jazz fans have been spoiled in the past by the richness of the “Jazz at the Lobero” concert offerings, featuring some of the finest jazz artists on the world stage. It so happens that the Lobero, among its many virtues, is one of the primo jazz rooms in the country, and has been so anointed by DownBeat magazine. Such lingering fond memories have made the possibility of jazz in said room over the past few years a bittersweet thing.

Memory serves up a glittery cavalcade of highlights from the “Jazz at the Lobero” annals: multiple visits from Pat Metheny, localized hero Charles Lloyd, the late great Dave Brubeck, Ahmad Jamal, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Brad Mehldau, Tierney Sutton, Dianne Reeves, Branford Marsalis, Chick Corea, Kenny Barron, Jack DeJohnette, Esperanza Spalding … and the list goes on. The list has reduced to a trickle in the COVID and post-COVID era, unfortunately. But the spirit — and the letter and the swing — of “Jazz at the Lobero” came rushing back onstage on Saturday night, as the fine New Orleans-ian Derek Douget Band capped off its annual week-long residency on this legendary stage.

There was a critical twist involved: we, the small but rapt audience, were ourselves on stage, watching the band perform on the lip of the proscenium and facing an empty house of gorgeous red seats. It all made for a fabulous and slightly surreal reversal of theatrical rules, in which the stage itself was transformed into a surrogate nightclub setting, a kind of “speakeasy” atmosphere, as executive director David Asbell told the crowd. Tables populated the stage, for mostly nattily dressed guests played with savory vittles and a bar offering sazeracs and more.

Had there been an audience in tow, we would have been the extras in the nightclub scene.

The Douget band’s Santa Barbara residency tradition involves visiting a myriad of local schools for master classes and workshops in the week leading up to the finale concert, and this weekend’s performance featured cameos by several fine young players from UCSB, including drummer/jazz band head Jon Nathan, who served up a tasty second line groove in his own stage moment.

This special evening went by the moniker “A Night in the Big Easy,” and will hopefully become an annual affair, highlighting the Lobero’s music- and music education-supportive Brubeck Circle. Patronage came from sources including the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation and Montecito Bank, which has long supported music education in town. And “education” is an operative buzzword and m.o. for Douget and Co., whose members are all well-established educators as well as performers with resumés including working in the late Ellis Marsalis’s band.

Douget himself is a tasteful and melodic voice on tenor sax, engaging in empathetic conversational mingling with his dazzling trumpeter comrade Ashlin Parker. The band, also featuring fluid pianist Victor “Red” Atkins and the solid drums and bass forces of Adonis Rose and Jason Stewart, respectively, gave us speakeasy customers plenty to chew on and groove to. “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and such Crescent City taste treats as “Iko Iko” mixed in with straighter jazz material and Harold Battiste’s gorgeous ballad “Beautiful Old Ladies.”

Everything worked like a charm, and the Lobero as jazz room mythology awakened from its nap. More, please.

Southern Rock and Starshipped Retro Timing in the Re-opened Granada

Speaking of venue awakenings, there was a special added pleasure in catching the dinosaur rock twofer show with Marshall Tucker and Jefferson Starship at The Granada Theater on Sunday (keep an eye out for Leslie Dinaberg’s review at independent.com). This grand theater — currently celebrating its centennial — had to go dark for a couple of months due to flooding, sending programmers scrambling to alternative venues. As a side effect of the dark zone, we were also reminded how central and critical the Granada is to cultural life in Santa Barbara. Absence made the heart, mind, and ears grow fonder.

On Sunday, the Granada looked and sounded bodaciously fine at age 100. The pair of retro rock outfits, riding the ‘70s heyday rails, put on energetic sets adding up to a 3.5 hour show before a sold-out house. With vintage bands, there is always the question of attrition and authenticity: at what point does a long-in-the-tooth rock band become a skilled cover band, once missing its key ingredients in the personnel department?

In the Starship’s case, the last original member standing is Summer of Love handyman David Freiberg, sounding strong despite his stage move limitations. They last played Santa Barbara at the Chumash Casino in 2013, when co-founder Paul Kantner was still alive. But the current band, ironically, may be a tighter unit, benefitting from the power and salty humor of lead singer Cathy Richardson and wizard guitarist Jude Gold, whose dazzling playing included a super-charged electric guitar arrangement of Jorma Kaukonen’s “Embryonic Journey,” from the 1967 Jefferson Airplane album Surrealistic Pillow. (Technical note: Gold played through a Marshall cabinet, while the Marshall Tucker gang avoided such branding).

During intermission, a set change — with a massive backdrop of a wild-riding stagecoach image hung for Marshall Tucker — and genre attitude change were in order, with Southern Rock supergroup Marshall Tucker Band cooking up its familiar musical math. It’s still all about two sweetly wailing guitars, often three chords per song, and the signature sound of flute (from Marcus James Henderson, the youngster in the bunch) and the avuncular hipster ramblings of singer Doug Stone, the only original member on board. Their simple hook machine got the crowd going, to the tune of “Can’t You See,” “Take the Highway” and “Heard it in a Love Song,” and extended instrumental jam workouts kept us guessing and sinking into the Tucker sound.

It all added up to a good time, 50 years down the road, in a 100-year-old theater now back in business.

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To-Doings:

Intrepid multi-limbed, multi-instrumentalist Adam Phillips has done wonders kicking his adventurous and popular Santa Barbara Folk Orchestra to life in recent years, and the next concert program’s theme arrives with a timely tang. Things Irish are on the collective mind around St. Patrick’s Day, which makes it a no-brainer that the geo-cultural focus at this weekend’s three concerts (Friday night, March 8 at Los Olivos’s St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley, Saturday evening at Trinity Episcopal Church and Sunday afternoon at El Presidio Chapel) is all about Irishness.

Meanwhile, the always inspiring ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! continues its own adventures in geo-cultural advocacy, mostly related to regional Mexican music. After the relatively pure genre encounter with mariachi in January, courtesy of the all-female Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles, the going gets hybrid this weekend with the L.A.-based group Quitapenas (Friday at Isla Vista School, Saturday in Guadalupe and Sunday evening at the Marjorie Luke Theatre).

Quitapenas is comprised of offspring of immigrants, doing some border-crossing and era-cross-stitching, with notions from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, and spanning the Latin American turf of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere. It’s an artistically challenging mixture they’re after, without sacrificing the primacy of the dance factor. Come prepared to listen, think, and move.

In other UCSB Arts & Lectures news, this weekend brings friendly acoustic guitar wizard Tommy Emmanuel back to town, at Campbell Hall on Saturday, and Sunday belongs to Sierra Ferrell (see story here), the potent and charismatic new country artist worth knowing, playing Campbell Hall. Yes, set the Oscars for record and get thee to Goleta’s Grand New Opry for a night. Ferrell is worth the sacrifice.

“Tales from the Tavern,” a great musical series two-plus decades deep into its mission of bringing inspired singer-songwriters of the Americana sort and beyond, continues to make many Wednesday nights at Santa Ynez’ vibe-y Maverick Saloon the place to be. Two weeks ago, the man in the spotlight was John Doe, of X and John Doe fame. Next Wednesday’s great excuse to head to Santa Ynez is a double bill of James Lee Stanley and Kim Richey. Be there. Eat a burger, drink a beer, soak it up.