Author Archives: joemiller

After all, not everyone can be a winner

I found myself in the Midwest recently, at a summer family reunion. Uncles, aunts, cousins and their kids were spread throughout a large conference room—a former high school gym, and I found myself conversing with the wife of a farming cousin. Somehow we got onto the topic of equality.

“I think we do our children a disservice when we tell them everyone is the same, and there are no winners and losers,” she stated. I reckoned she was addressing what she suspected were my own West Coast liberal biases.

“That’s simply not realistic,” she went on, “and it does not prepare them for life. That spoils children, and makes them believe they are entitled to everything just for the asking. Kids need to learn that not everyone can win, and if you want to win you are going to have to fight for it.”

This comment bothered me. Partly it was her mistaken association of equality with rewards. Equality to me means level opportunity, and equal standing before the law. It is not a suppressing of excellence or achievement. But clearly she thought that equality could erase valuable distinctions, and erasing value seemed threatening. Continue reading →

Bassist/Singer Kirstin Korb – Interview

“WHAT’S YOUR STORY?” TOUR

MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013 / SOhO RESTAURANT AND MUSIC CLUB

Kristin Korb finds her life moving in double time these days. The gifted jazz singer and bass player, who married in 2011 and moved to Denmark, is President-elect of the International Society of Bassists, and is frantically coordinating their annual conference next month.  Plus, Korb has just released a new album, What’s Your Story?—her sixth since her auspicious debut in 1996 with the Ray Brown Trio. A West Coast tour brings her, and her new material, to SOhO next Monday.

Your first album since your move to Denmark teams you with some powerful company: former Ray Brown Trio drummer Jeff Hamilton and USC faculty guitar wizard Bruce Forman.

The whole reason that I wanted to record with them is because they’ve been mentors of mine.  I’ve known Jeff for the last 20 years, and Bruce for about the last 10 years. I think as we change in our lives, and as we make some major shifts, I found I was going back to my iPod and listening to the things that I fell in love with.  I fell in love with jazz in the first place with the stuff that had grooves and a sense of fun and play and interaction between the musicians, and that’s the stuff that I really gravitated towards during my first year living in Denmark. One of the first things I did with Ray Brown was a vocalise for [the Count Basie tune] ‘Whirlybird’.  I found myself going back in to the vocalise thing again, going back into these songs that rely on the interplay, fun, friendship and trust that people have when they’re good friends.  Continue reading →

Classical Now – May 26, 2014, Memorial Day

Classical Now – May 26, 2014 hour 1

Classical Now – May 26, 2014 hour 2

We celebrate Memorial Day with music by Charles Ives, “Decoration Day” from his Holiday Symphony. May 25 was the death anniversary of British composer Gustav Holst; while May 31 is Walt Whitman’s birthday.  We pull it all together with Holst’s setting of “A Dirge for Two Veterans.”  We also hear Holst’s symphonic poem, “Indra.”  “New World a-Comin’
” by Duke Ellington will be played. Sprinkled throughout are a few marches from John Philip Sousa.

Henry David Thoreau – Still in the Mail: Messages from the Imagination

This week we air a lecture presented by Joseph Miller at the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara on May 31, 2014.

The Institute of World Culture was co-founded in Santa Barbara in 1976, the United States

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

bicentennial year, by visionary philosopher Raghavan Iyer and his wife, Nandini, both professors at UC Santa Barbara at the time.

For nearly forty years the IWC has presented seminars, lectures, performances and study groups with the aim of promoting universal fellowship through understanding. “A world culture,” states its declaration, “is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This lecture is entitled, “Henry David Thoreau—Still in the Mail: Messages from the Imagination,” and centers on Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and his correspondence with Harrison Blake.

Gabriel Kahane – The Ambassador

According to some critics the classical concert hall for decades has come to resemble a church or museum, a glass-case sanctuary for the ritualization of the yesterday’s revelations. According to composer, vocalist and songwriter, Gabriel Kahane, this is all a passing phase, an anomaly in the time-line of Western music, a “dark moment of the kind of High Modernism of the 1950s where the academy kind of strangled populism,” he explained to me by phone in January 2014. “If you take that aberration out of the narrative, there’s always been a connection between the vernacular and what’s in the concert hall.”

Photo by Jen Snow

Photo by Jen Snow

Connection is what Kahane is all about, with his broad association between genres, artists and styles. He is representative of a new breed of the classically-conversant who are jumping ship, taking advantage of breakthroughs in the categorical hull by earlier daring cross-over artists, and navigating entirely new vessels and routes. The son of concert pianist and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Music Director, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel’s mélange of projects have included orchestral and chamber compositions, pop songs and musical theater. A pianist, guitarist and banjo player, he gained a kind of cult status for his witty song-cycle, Craigslistlieder, which set actual texts from the eponymous classified ad web site. At the same time, his compositional prowess has earned him commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet. Last seen in Santa Barbara at Hahn Hall in 2011 with premier cellist Alisa Weilerstein, Kahane returned on February 4, 2014, courtesy of UCSB Arts & Lectures, to rock SOhO Music Club with like-minded chamber group, yMusic.

We spoke of Kahane’s signing on to Sony Masterworks, and his new release, “The Ambassador,” an album inspired by Los Angeles Architecture.

Awakening the sleeping sword of war

Happy Few presented by Ratatat Theater Group at Santa Barbara Veterans Memorial Bldg. on Friday, November 8, 2013.

Many Americans confuse Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and only register at some level that these two holidays have something to do with men and women in uniform. The more thoughtful might read a book, or watch a TV special. Actor and playwright Casey Caldwell has raised the thoughtfulness bar much higher. The Artistic Director of Ratatat Theater Group interviewed nearly two dozen local veterans, and then carefully meshed their words with a skeletal edit of Shakespeare’s Henry V. The result is Happy Few, a full body immersion into the passions and vagaries of war as experienced through the hearts and shattered nerves of those who know it best, a dramatic march in the combat boots of another. Continue reading →

Dusting Off the Flentrop

Organist James Welch in recital, sponsored by UCSB Dept. of Music. At UCSB’s Lotte Lehman Concert Hall on Friday, January 10, 7:30 pm.

When you order a new car with “all the bells and whistles”, recognized or not you have torn a page from pipe organ history. Mighty theater organs like The Wonder Morton housed at the Arlington Theater—great symphonic machines built during the silent movie era—not only blow ten thousand pipes, but also shake and whirl a host of special effects like sleigh bells and train whistles. With the Early Music Revival of the mid-Twentieth Century, and its hunger for “authentic” instruments and styles, a lean Neo-Baroque sensibility prevailed in the pipe organ world, and with it a retreat from the electronic advantages of modern engineering, and entertainment culture excesses. Continue reading →

James Welch and the Fabulous Flentrop

In 1977 James Welch was offered the job of Adjunct Professor and Lecturer in Organ at UCSB, a position he held for 16 years. During his tenure, Welch performed at least 25 recitals on the Flentrop organ, and sponsored regular recitals by his students. But Welch’s departure in 1993 marked the suspension of active life for the Flentrop. No one knew the instrument so well, and few have known it since. With a dwindling of Music Department interest and funds (and no Sunday service to keep its bellows regularly inspired—as would be the case for a campus chapel organ) the instrument has languished half its life largely unused.

Full essay here.

I interviewed organist James Welch by phone just prior to his recital, sponsored by UCSB Dept. of Music, at Lotte Lehman Concert Hall on Friday, January 10, 7:30 pm.

TURNING ON THE UNIVERSE

Santa Barbaran Daniel Godinez hitches his wagon to the stars

July 2012—It’s Saturday morning and 15-year-old Daniel Godinez catches the bus from his home twelve miles outside of Santa Barbara. With transfers and delays, he pieces together a two-hour circuitous ride to the Museum of Natural History, the sprawling stucco and tile casa ranchero-inspired building, nestled creek-side amidst foothills that rise into mountains. He walks along an empty parking lot, past an enormous blue whale skeleton, through the adobe entrance, and cuts a diagonal across the open courtyard. Pulling the door open, marked “Gladwin Planetarium,” he feels his way along a dark aisle towards control booth, and senses the awesome presence of the shadowed dome overhead, as if being watched. In less than an hour seats will fill for the first show of the day; but for now he is alone. This is Daniel’s moment; he is about to turn on the universe.

If you had happened to take a seat that morning, leaning back, you would have been guided through the wonders of our solar system and beyond, by an upbeat and articulate astronomer who appears far too young to be versed in 14 billion years of cosmic arcana. How did this young man get to where he is? When did the stars begin to glow in his sky? Continue reading →