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Gerald Carpenter: Ring In 2010 with Santa Barbara Symphony
If you haven’t finalized your plans for New Year’s Eve, please allow me to recommend the Santa Barbara Symphony’s New Year’s Eve Pops Concert, from 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Thursday at The Granada.
It is easily the most pleasant, undemanding and congenial way to spend the long evening before the countdown. And be warned: This event sold out last year.
The guest conductor this year will be Jeff Tyzik, who was quite a hit last year conducting the Boston Pops’ New Year’s Eve. More than a baton-waver, Maestro Tyzik is also an arranger, programmer and host of exceptional achievement.
The tradition began under the music directorship of Varujan Kojian, who conducted all of the New Year’s Eve concerts himself, and obviously enjoyed himself immensely. I like to think his spirit presides over the concert every year, whoever is on the podium.
Gisèle Ben-Dor carried on bravely, but more in the nature of being a good sport. Toward the end of her tenure, she would bring in guest conductors for the Dec. 31 concert, always choosing the perfect musician for the job. Nir Kabaretti has clearly chosen to follow Ben-Dor’s lead, and with Tyzik may have trumped any previous choices.
The symphony uses the words “swing” and “swinging” a lot when describing its New Year’s Eve concert. It’s easy to see why, when you consider that the program contains, among other gems, Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Satin Doll,” “In a Sentimental Mood” and “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be”; Count Basie’s “Basie’s Back In Town,” “Lullaby For Basie” and, of course, “One O’Clock Jump”; Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” (from The Sting) and “Sun Flower Slow Drag”; and Glenn Miller’s “St. Louis Blues March,” “A String Of Pearls,” “Song Of The Volga Boatman” and “In The Mood.”
As this program makes plain, New Year’s Eve is never about the future. It’s always about the past. Music is always a time machine, and this program — save the turn-of-the-century Joplin — transports us back to the 1930s and 1940s, when Americans were all pretty much going through the same things, such as the Great Depression and World War II. There wasn’t such a burden on the holidays as there is now.
This, too, is all American music, and in the matter of swing or ragtime or Big Band sound, Americans have the field entirely to themselves. Certainly, no one does it better, and few even try. It still has much pleasure to give as music, and not just as a nostalgic trigger. Anybody who thinks that what Ellington did — or Miller — wasn’t “composing,” should try it sometime. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of detective fiction, this music is an art form Americans invented and of which we remain the undisputed masters.
Tickets for the symphony’s New Year’s Eve concert are available from the Granada box office at 1214 State St. or 805.899.2222, or click here to purchase tickets online.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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