SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : A Little Night Music : Stanley Wind Ensemble shows off works of Shostakovich, Grainger and Ives at its annual Thousand Oaks summer concert.

Wind ensembles blur the line between “serious” music and brassy functionality. They occupy a rare and special place in the world of music, perched precariously between the orchestral wind and brass sections and the marching band tradition of Sousa, et al.

All they want is a little respect. Clearly, they deserve it. Come to think of it, so does Sousa. So does Charles Ives.

Somehow, a wind ensemble is the perfect choice for a midsummer night’s musical affair, as was shown at last Saturday’s concert by the Stanley Wind Ensemble.

The ensemble is a seasonal flower, which appeared for its second annual summer concert in Thousand Oaks at the First Christian Church. Led by 19-year-old Mike Stanley, a student at UCLA and a French hornist, the 40-member ensemble is culled from high schools, colleges and other amateur and professional ranks.

Apart from some errant intonation and moments of rhythmic fuzziness, the ensemble performed beautifully. There were detectable levels of dedication and esprit de corps that guided the group through Shostakovich’s fanfare-like “Festive Overture” and the folk-music inspired etudes of the British composer Percy Grainger.

There was also the unabashedly sweet hum of Grainger’s “Irish Tune From County Derry” (a.k.a. “Danny Boy”) and the sentimental soup of Alfred Reed’s “Russian Christmas Music” to end the concert.

But the highlight of the concert was clearly Ives’ wonderfully witty and sometimes chaotic “Country Band March.” Ives, besides being arguably the greatest and most archetypal American composer, had a special flair for revisionist band music. Here, he paid tribute to the phenomenon of simultaneous bands playing different tunes in different keys.

But mockery wasn’t Ives’ intention. With pieces like this, he celebrated the accidental virtues of amateurism, explored new ways of creating music, and portrayed the pluralistic nature of reality.

Ives’ polymorphous music seems all the more relevant today, with our ever-increasing information overload.

The Stanley Wind Ensemble, albeit a summertime entity, is a fine and brave keeper of the flame in a too-rarely featured idiom. Its next concert is Sept. 6 at the Ascension Lutheran Church in Thousand Oaks.

FURTHER NEW MUSIC ADVENTURES IN VENTURA

What would a summer in Ventura be without a Jeff Kaiser extravaganza to prod us along, jab at our complacency, and add new grist for the Ventura new music mill?

Trumpeter-composer-bon vivant Kaiser, who presents the music of others when not making his own, played both performer and impresario at two concerts on consecutive weekend nights in the Livery Arts Center early in July.

Last summer, Kaiser’s New Music Series involved a string of more modestly scaled performances. But the recent two-concert event, put on in the Performance Studio, proved to be concentrated samplers, showcasing both Venturan musicians and guests from other places in Southern California.

Officially, this was a concert of music from members of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music (SEAMUS), Los Angeles Chapter. Ventura’s Ted Killian, who offered a brief gust of inventiveness with his solo electric guitar format, is SEAMUS president.

The vocal contingent was well-represented by the “Vibratorium” music of Liz Stuart, a sturdy fixture in left-of-center music circles here as well as a member of the Ventura rock group Sinister Fisch. Her droning octet of singers created hypnotic, buzzing sonorities, and harmonic tension from microtonal “beating” between clashing notes.

The end effect is eerie and primal, reminiscent of David Hykes’ Harmonic Choir. Adding to the evocative vocal timbres were long tones from flutist Rene Janton and tinkly wind chimes.

Marc Ainger, the UCSB computer musician who is heading to a post at Ohio State this fall, did his part for promoting new music in the area. His tape piece, “Lament,” served as a picturesque sound painting of a farewell.

Friday night’s featured guest was the irrepressible avant-garde accordionist Nick Ariondo. In spite of its reputation, the accordion is given to extended techniques and experimentation. It is, as Ariondo said, “like an acoustic synthesizer.” Ariondo joins the ranks of accordionists such as James Nightengale and Guy Klusevsik--they’re all squeeze box rebels with a cause.

After maneuvering the tricky contours, atonal eddies, and strange sound textures of Roy Jelinek’s “Trepidations”--for tape and accordion--Ariondo served up a tour de force version of “Flight of the Bumblebee” as an encore. He finally stomped on the “bee” to close. Accordionists are show folk too.

Kaiser’s compositional contribution this time around was ironically tied to the election year. “A,EROCVA” is a wild slice ‘n’ dice variation on “America the Beautiful,” based on a text by George Keenan. Their pseudo-patriot games involved ad-hoc pig Latin and voice, radically altered by electronics. Kaiser played a man possessed--and processed.

On Saturday night, Kaiser played the musical voice in Southern California-based Mexican composer Bernardo Feldman’s electro-acoustic composition, “Caudal de Poesia” (“Wellspring of Rhymes”). A moving Requiem written for his late father, Feldman’s piece is a melancholy tone poem, with spacious synthesized sounds providing an underpainting for Kaiser’s steely, muted trumpet sound.

Strange as it may seem, new music still has a place in the heart of Ventura.

LAST HURRAH

Speaking of reasons to go out during the summer, the City Hall concert series is, unfortunately, facing an uncertain future due to curtailed city funding.

Whatever its fate, this year’s series went out on a high note. On July 18, the almost 20-year-old Elgart-Yates guitar duo (Matthew Elgart and Peter Yates) served up a dazzling program that included the music of Bach, Stravinsky, underdog serialist Josef Hauer, Django Reinhardt, Scriabin, the duo’s music for “prepared guitar” with strings manipulated by screws and other implements, and a Dadaist concoction by Joseph Klein.

Hearing such a garden of delights in the reverberant, marble-lined splendor of the City Hall lobby made the prospect of life without this 11-year-old series a sad subplot in the general saga of budgetary attrition.