WHAT WAS, ONCE MORE: As the year turns, the mind reels back, especially for those of us synched to the clock and calendar as cultural obsessives trying to make sense of a given year gone by. We make lists, check them once or twice, and brace for starting a new list come January. Economic specters loom, and the arts teeter, but the cultural gale, thankfully, continues, even in this God-kissed tourist town.
In Santa Barbara’s music year, another one chockablock with good excuses to get out of the house, the prominent good news/bad news report card ranged from a potent and generally stellar 75th-anniversary season at the Santa Barbara Bowl to the sobering news this fall that UCSB’s Arts & Lectures opted to leave jazz out of its concert programming for the first time in who knows how many years, especially after its jazz programming coup with Esperanza Spalding the previous season. But goodness certainly gleamed at the juncture of Anapamu and Milpas, where the amazing Bowl season included globe-owning, Goleta-bred superstar Katy Perry in a thrilling, over-the-top and up-close-and-personal shindig of a show, the blissful reunion of Buffalo Springfield, Don Henley, Fleet Foxes, Bright Eyes, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Janet Jackson … the shimmery list goes on.
Jazz, the Great American Music that remains a discerning listener’s realm apparently, is still the underrepresented musical life force in this town’s otherwise surprisingly strong showings in pop and classical music. That said, the packed Spalding show at Campbell Hall last spring, on the heels of her deserved Best New Artist Grammy, was a night to savor and remember. This multi-talented, semi-visionary woman has gone/is going places.