This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on September 12, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard's music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
Jazz alert: by some cosmic serendipity, the Santa Barbara/Ventura zone has seen a bounty of notable jazz action this September, of both the inside and outside, mainstream and left-of-mainstream kind. A happy anomaly or a trend? I opt for the latter, but wariness remains in a local music scene not always welcoming of visitors from the greater jazz world.
When catching live music is a regular part of life, both as personal passion and professional duty, details and specific impressions can get blurry. But highlights have a way of rising above the fuzz and the fray. This year, amongst a couple of hundred shows deep so far, one clear personal epiphany came in the small, 500-year-old Marienkapelle church on the Rhine River early in July. A half-hour solo concert by legendary trumpeter/musician Peter Evans , part of the Monheim Trienniale festival, effectively rearranged mental molecules and seized the nano-moments of my consciousness. I approved. Mightily. And the memory lingers.
I had heard Evans on many records and once live, when he was with the wacky-brilliant Mostly Other People Do the Killing, but to soak in a solo show at close range was almost too much to handle. It was killing, in the best way.