For many Santa Barbarians, Summer Solstice is the sum of its parade – bright colors, bare bellies, and a 100,000 or so of our closest “friends” in some variation of, “Yes, I play the djembe.” For whatever ways Solstice has morphed over the years, there remains the feeling of possibility; of knowing that, if only for a day, perceived limitations can melt away.
For others, Solstice is also the sum of four decades of collaboration – a deep dive into our human relationship to music, the soul of art, and what it means to be part of a community. My first Solstice memory was as a toddler at the Courthouse Sunken Gardens, where my father – and about a 100,000 of his closest friends – created an epic performance that, the previous year, had been translated from English into Spanish, ASL, and Nahuatl. Boundaries were faint. Spirits were high. And as a child who went on to perform on that same stage the following year – and in every parade for the next 20 – I simply believed that this was normal. All of life, like the art I had witnessed, was meant to be like this. Inclusive. Mysterious. Integrated. And most of all, fun.
My dad shamelessly enabled this for most of my life, and Solstice became our common ground. There were long hours. There were many sequins. I dreamed of collaborating on the Friday night kickoff event, which he conceived in response to the Courthouse years; the city, he maintained, craved more than the parade. We needed to come together as a community, build excitement for Saturday, and deliver the kind of performance that keeps us vibrant. Last year would have been our first crack at this, but then my dad got sick – really sick. The kind of sick where you don’t know if someone is going to make it to Solstice, let alone be there to run sound cues. So when he blessedly recovered, returning to an even higher level of inspiration, I sent him a text message: “Wanna collaborate on Solstice 2017 and bring a bunch of people together and make it the coolest thing ever?”