On the fun-loving face of it, last Friday’s four-hour/four-act Santa Barbara Bowl concert, with Trombone Shorty as headliner, offered heaping portions of the emotional quality promised by opener Mavis Staples: “positive vibrations.” Timing was in its favor. Despite the lack of cultural links to anything Old Spanish Days-related, the escapist Fiesta spirit was humming on the Bowl’s hillside perch.
On a deeper and more musical and stylistic level, the evening amounted to an inadvertent revue-style show with embedded history and regional lessons attached, on the thematic turf of American musical roots and shoots.
Shorty himself is steeped in culture from his hometown of New Orleans, as he bridges traditional Crescent City music with his latter-day stylings. Pedal steel-mastering dynamo Robert Randolph, heir to the great, underrated “sacred steel” world, opened the evening with a powerful gospel-meets-Hendrix gusto. The theme of gospel as the seedbed of much American music continued with the great octogenarian gospel queen Staples, who closed her scene-stealing set with a fifty-plus year-old classic, “I’ll Take You There.” As a solo artist and member of the Staple Singers, Mavis reminded us that “we’ve been taking you there for 75 years.” True, that.