The Annual Reed Family Concert: “In a Community of Musicians: Celebrating 35 years at UC, San Diego,” featuring Steven Schick with artist partners Carlos Rosas, Rand Steiger, and Shahrokh Yadegari
Percussion Hall of Fame inductee and early Bang On a Can Allstars’ soloist Steven Schick has never performed in the classic-rock band Steppenwolf. But his 1994 debut solo album, “Born To Be Wild,” shares the same name as the hard-rocking 1968 song that remains the long-dormant Steppenwolf’s biggest hit.
Wild is also an apt description of some of the most fierce and fearless concerts I have witnessed by Schick, who brings a finely calibrated degree of fire and finesse to his most charged and delicate pieces alike.
A champion of cutting-edge music and the author of the of the 2006 book “The Percussionist’s Art,” he plays with singular intensity, theatricality and purpose. On his captivating 2022 double-album, “A Hard Rain,” Schick — a self-described “linguist in the language of noises” — performs on nearly 200 percussion instruments.
That number pales markedly compared to the number of concerts he has done at UC San Diego since he became a music professor there in 1991.
“I stopped counting when I reached 2,000 performances,” Schick noted recently. “And given that I am also a product of the community, there are nearly no projects of note that I can say have arisen completely independently from my tenure at UC San Diego.”
To celebrate his 35-year tenure at the school — and its nurturing community of musicians — Schick will will open a four-month, four-concert series at the campus on Wednesday with help from some very distinguished colleagues.
His repertoire will cover more than 100 years of music, from Kurt Schwitters’ a cappella tour de force “UrSonata” and Iannis Xenakis’ percussion and oboe duet “Dmaathen” to Brian Ferneyhough’s “Bone Alphabet” and Rand Steiger’s “For Robert Erickson.”
He may not produce any heavy metal thunder — at least not in the “Born To Be Wild”/Steppenwolf sense of the phrase. But for percussive adventure, periodic sonic thunder and a sky-high level of musicality, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more arresting percussion-driven concert anywhere next week.
7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21. Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at UC San Diego, 9410 Russell Lane, La Jolla. $10-$20. music-web.ucsd.edu/concerts
The Hamilton de Holanda Trio will open the Athenaeum Jazz Winter Series on Tuesday, Jan. 20, at the Scripps Research Auditorium in La Jolla. Shown from left are keyboardist Salomão Soares, mandolinist de Holanda and drummer Thiago “Big” Rabello. (Courtesy Athenaeum Music & Arts Library)
Hamilton de Holanda Trio
Brazilian music great Hamilton de Holanda has collaborated with everyone from Dave Matthews and Led Zeppelin co-founder John Paul Jones to Wynton Marsalis, Gonzalo Rubalcaba and the late Chick Corea.
A master of the bandolim, a 10-string Portuguese mandolin, de Holanda is a performer with jaw-dropping skill and imagination. His music seamlessly fuses jazz, classical and choro, a Brazilian music style that is as rhythmically exuberant as it is melodically and harmonically dazzling.
There is also a palpable sense of joy in his music that reminds me of fellow mandolin greats Davis Grisman and Chris Thile, who have also taken their respetive instruments to new heights. For a stunning example, go to YouTube and check out de Holanda’s “Flying Chicken,” a 4-minute and 41-second gem that should have you grinning from ear to ear.
“Flying Chicken” teams him with the sparkling keyboardist Salomão Soares and the propulsive drummer Thiago “Big” Rabello, who will join him Tuesday for the trio’s San Diego debut. This will be the second area visit for de Holanda, who several years performed a private solo concert in the backyard of a Normal Heights fan.
De Holanda and his trio will open the 2026 Athenaeum Jazz Winter Series, which continues with a Jan. 28 concert by the Paul Cornish Trio, whose piano-playing namesake is an alum of the UC San Diego Jazz Camp.
The series continues with two Feb. 14 performances by the sublime Israeli-born clarinetist Anat Cohen and her three-man Brazilian music group, Quartetinho. It concludes with a return concert by Norway’s Tord Gustavsen Trio. But first comes de Holanda and his ace band.
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 20. Athenaeum Jazz at Scripps Research Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla. $53-$58. 858-454-5872. ljathenaeum.org/jazz
The New Jersey band Dogs In A Pile will perform two back-to-back nights at the Belly Up. (Courtesy Dogs In A Pile)
Dogs In A Pile, with Where’s West?
If there is another jam band besides Dogs In A Pile that sometimes opens its shows with the SpongeBob SquarePants’ favorite “Stadium Rave” and hails from the same New Jersey hometown as Bruce Springsteen, I have yet to hear them.
I was tipped off about Dogs by author, music historian and Grateful Dead confidante-cum-biographer Dennis McNally. By coincidence, this five-man band takes its name from a lyrical couplet in the “He’s Gone,” a 1972 Grateful Dead song that predates the birth of Dogs’ members by more than a quarter-century.
Unlike too many Dead- and Phish-inspired jam bands, Dogs performs with consistent spunk, dexterity, focus and precision even in its most out-there psychedelic moments.
Dogs also has a welcome sense of humor, as evidenced by the title of its 2021 debut album, “Not Your Average Beagle,” The band also has an admirably broad musical range, as befits a quintet whose concerts mixes its expansive original songs with spirited covers of classics by everyone from Little Feat, Chick Corea, Elvis Costello and the Allman Brothers to Ween, Lorde, Fiona Apple, The Wiggles and, of course, the Dead.
Dogs’ 2026 tour, which kicks off this week, comes barely a week after the death of Bob Weir, who co-founded the Dead in 1965 and is the sole musician to have performed in every iteration of the pioneering San Francisco band.
Bob Weir’s proposed Old Globe musical followed his arrest at a San Diego Grateful Dead show
Given that Dogs has previously performed such Weir gems as “One More Saturday Night” at its concerts, it seems especially likely they will do so at their two San Diego shows this weekend.
8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 18, and Sunday, Jan. 19. Belly Up, 143 South Cedros Avenue, Solana Beach. $25-$44 (must be 21 or older to attend). bellyup.com