An incredible lineup of musicians — including Brenda Russell, Tamara and Bill Champlin, Táta Vega and the band Pockets — will be playing an intimate show at 4 p.m. Friday at the Hill-Carrillo Adobe, 15 E. Carrillo St. in Santa Barbara.
The performance is a benefit for The Rhythmic Arts Program (TRAP), which drummer/TRAP founder and CEO Eddie Tuduri describes as a program that “educates individuals with intellectual and developmental differences as well as children in typical preschools by embracing a unique methodology that encompasses rhythm as a modality to address basic life and learning skills as well as reading, writing and arithmetic.”
“Our approach includes visual, tactile, auditory and perceptual motor matches combined with speech to achieve results,” he said. “You literally see it, feel it, hear it and speak the lesson.”
Friday’s event will also include an amazing auction, with signed items from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Merle Haggard; Jeff Bridges; Bonnie Raitt; and more, with proceeds going to TRAP.
Tickets are $65 and reservations are highly recommended. Call 805.962.1442 or email eddie@traponline.com for more information.
Brenda Russell, who will be a special guest performer at the event, spoke to Noozhawk about Friday’s show, plus the stories behind her hit songs “Piano in the Dark” and “Get Here.”
Click here for the full interview, which also covers Russell’s work on the Broadway musical, The Color Purple.
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Jeff Moehlis: What can we look forward to at the upcoming show?
Brenda Russell: I’m going to sing a couple of songs. I’m looking forward to it — I love Bill and Tamara Champlin, and Táta Vega. I’ve known them a long time. It’ll be fun for us all to be together and sing with each other. We’re going to have a good time.
I love Eddie Tuduri’s foundation, TRAP, what he’s doing with the children. So I look forward to being there to serve.
JM: How long have you known Eddie?
BR: Eddie played drums for the very first concert I ever did. I didn’t even realize that until he reminded me, because it was so long ago. It was my very first show, and he was the drummer and James Newton Howard was the keyboardist, which is really funny — he scores movies now, he’s a major player in the movie score business.
There were just a lot of talented people on the stage.
JM: That’s a good way to start, right?
BR: Yeah, it was a great way to start. I was so scared I totally lost everything that was in my stomach before I went onstage. I was so petrified.
My first show was on the lot of A&M, which used to be Charlie Chaplin’s movie production company and became A&M Records owned by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. It was a big conference for black radio from all over the country — so it was like, you know, a little thing (laughs). My first show, with all these heavyweight radio people from across the nation.
I was a little nervous.
JM: I want to ask you about your song “Piano in the Dark.” What’s the story behind that song?
BR: The music was written by Jeff Hull, mostly, and Scott Cutler. They sent me a cassette tape of the music, and it was beautiful. When I played it I thought, “Wow, that’s beautiful.”
I’m a person who collects song titles — I had this book of song titles. They called me after I’d had it for a couple of days, and they said, “What’ve you got?” They were very excited that I was going to write the lyric and the melody. And I didn’t have anything because I was just listening.
So as I’m talking to them I flipped open my book of titles, and the thing that jumped out at me was “Piano in the Dark.” And I went, “How about ‘Piano in the Dark’?” That’s how easy it was. I didn’t even think about it. “How about ‘Piano in the Dark’?”
And they went really quiet, and then they said, “What does that mean?” (laughs) I was like, “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.” And I figured it out.
It always amazes me how you never know what’s going to happen with a song. I didn’t even think about it — it just jumped off the page, that title. It seemed to go with the music, in my mind. So I just blurted it out.
JM: Another one of your songs was “Get Here,” which was a hit for Oleta Adams. What’s the story behind that song?
BR: I wrote that song when I was in Stockholm, Sweden. I had this great little apartment, sort of a penthouse apartment in this old building. It had an octagonal room that I used as my writing room, overlooking the city of Stockholm. This one particular day there were some hot-air balloons. That city is very incredible — it’s beautiful — and I just got the idea of how many ways can a person get to a person.
It became a game. I like writing songs as part of a game. Can you reach them by railway? By trailway? Can you reach them with your mind? By caravan? Across the desert like an Arab man? It becomes fun to do that.
But I thought it was really corny when I wrote it. My friend — my Swedish engineer — I asked him to come over so I could play it for him to see what he thought. Because I was recording in Stockholm at the time. He thought it was really good, so I kept going forward.
I actually tried not to write the song because my record company was telling me I needed an up-tempo song, and this was not that. So I didn’t even record it or write it down, or hum it into a machine. I had no way of notating the song.
I went to bed, and usually if you don’t put something down you forget it, like a dream. And when I woke up the next morning the melody was still in my head, which has never happened to me before or since, that you go to sleep and you wake up and the song’s still there.
That was unique, and I knew that meant that I had to pay attention and go and write the song, on a spiritual level.
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Click here for the full interview with Brenda Russell.
— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his web site, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.