Cultural Crescendo

Considered on a grand historical scale, the new millennium is a momentous turning of numbers.

Taken at face value, it’s just a tick of the clock, a mechanical maneuver. We’ve been programmed to think of the bigger picture, to consider the significance of this historical moment and to jitter over the ominous portent of Y2K.

Maybe the best idea, though, is to avoid the grandiose and think locally. Which brings us to the annual wrap-up of the local music scene, classical and jazz division.

On the whole, there was plenty to bend an ear for this year in a territory that has been increasing its cultural health, slowly and surely, over the last several years. More and more, there are good reasons for committed classical music fans to stay in the county rather than take to the 101 south.

Repertoire-wise, the New West Symphony waxed conservative, generally, perhaps heeding caution after an economic scare in the previous season.

But however traditional its current outlook, the band that Boris Brott leads is a proud contender in the ranks of Southern California orchestras and something always worth hearing.

It brought Lou Harrison as part of the scaled-down “Musics Alive!” series and bolstered the modest opera scene around these parts by offering a respectable “Tosca” last spring.

The New West also premiered local composer John Biggs’ enjoyably referential confection “Sousaphernalia” this fall.

Meanwhile, the other prominent local composer, Miguel del Aguila, remained relatively aloof from the local music scene, apart from leading the Ojai Camerata and the commendable student composer program “Voices.”

On a smaller orchestral scale, the Conejo Symphony--related to but different from the original orchestra that merged with the Ventura County Symphony to form the New West--continued its momentum.

The Ventura Master Chorale and Los Robles Master Chorale continued to enliven the choral scene, with the latter hosting its first annual Chorale festival at Moorpark College, a tradition in the making. Camerata Pacifica continued its upward spiral, presenting the area’s finest regular series of chamber music concerts.

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And then there are the more established festivals in the area, including Ventura County’s most internationally renowned event, the Ojai Festival.

This year’s festival was especially juicy and provocative, a Finnish-accented affair designed and led by Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Music by Salonen and his compadre Magnus Lindberg, and a balanced roster of other material, gave the audience something to think about. In other words, the Ojai Festival lived up to its reputation this year.

One locally grown event of great importance to the cultural fabric here is the Ventura Chamber Music Festival, which celebrated its fifth anniversary with flair.

Summertime is more or less given over to the impressive, internationally pitched musical menu of Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West.

Jazz rears its head at irregular intervals in Ventura County.

We can still land at 66 California to hear local and L.A. musicians keeping the jazz flame alive in downtown Ventura. But the showcase concerts once heard at Wheeler Hot Springs are sorely missed.

There were also some isolated jazz incidents of note. Saxophonist Red Holloway sneaked into Ojai recently for a show, and the venerable Preservation Hall Jazz Band played in the Janss-Nichols Gallery in Thousand Oaks last summer--a good idea worthy of an encore.

The Latin-jazz pride of Oxnard, the Estrada Brothers, played around the area just enough to stay fresh.

They also attempted to record a live album at the Carnegie Art Museum, but the quality wasn’t quite up to snuff. Elsewhere, guitarist Robben Ford offered his distinctive bluesy-boppy sound, and pianist Roger Kellaway shared his polished wares.

To the far left of jazz orthodoxy, trumpeter and new music impresario Jeff Kaiser, who with Keith McMullen runs pfMentum, made Ventura safe for danger with a series of concerts by mostly California-based avant garde-leaning players.

Among the engaging suspects: Vinnie Golia, Nels Cline, Brad Dutz and Northwesterner Rob Blakeslee. In the humble warmth of the Daily Grind, players like Mike Vlatkovich and Billy Mintz showed up to play.

Kaiser himself, usually good for at least one major project, explored sonic-spatial ideas with the video-performance-installation piece “Ganz Andere” in the Third Floor Gallery in Ventura City Hall last spring.

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Up the road, Marcus Roberts played at UC Santa Barbara, and the second edition of the new and improved Santa Barbara Jazz Festival was fortified with an ambition that didn’t pay off in fiscal terms but gave us much to savor.

Gilles Apap, the gleefully eclectic and globe-trotting virtuoso who had been signed to Sony before negotiations crumbled, decided to go indie, with his own label and debut CD.

Apap’s concerts with the Santa Barbara Symphony, in recital at the Lobero and at a CD-release party at Victoria Hall this fall were among the top events of the musical year. One of the high points of the regional classical recording scene came from the UCSB Chamber Choir, which assembled a healthfully diverse gamut of music under the banner “Scandinavian Choral Music.”

The material includes music old and new, performed with a focused intensity under Canadian conductor Michel Marc Gervais’ direction.

It was just another year in the culture zone north of Los Angeles, slouching toward the new millennium, with intimations of brighter, richer-sounding tomorrows.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.