Pauline Adamek
The 2016 edition of KCRW’s World Festival at the Hollywood Bowl celebrates the return of music legend Brian Wilson celebrating the 50thanniversary of the iconic album Pet Sounds, Sunday, July 10, at 7 pm. The Beach Boys’ co-founder, along with former bandmates Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin are in the middle of a more than 70-date tour honoring the album, which has been hailed as one of the greatest of all time. The group will perform the album in its entirety as well as hits and fan favorites spanning Wilson’s 54-year career with The Beach Boys and as a solo artist.
Opening the evening is M. Ward, the Portland-based singer/songwriter/producer and multi-instrumentalist, celebrating his latest release More Rain. His most recent appearance at the Hollywood Bowl was in 2013 with Zooey Deschanel as She & Him.
The evening is hosted by KCRW DJ Anne Litt.
Brian Wilson is one of popular music’s most deeply revered figures, a legendary writer, producer, arranger and performer of some of the most cherished music in pop music history. He began his career as a teenaged founding member of The Beach Boys, who signed with Capitol Records in July 1962 and released their first album, Surfin’ Safari, that same year. The band’s initial surf-rock focus was soon broadened to include other themes. Wilson’s innovative vocal and instrumental arrangements for major hits including “I Get Around,” “California Girls,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” and the No. 1 smash “Good Vibrations” made The Beach Boys America’s preeminent band of the 1960s. Wilson has also achieved great solo success with 11of his own albums released to date, including his acclaimed 2004 completion of an album he first began recording in the ’60s, Brian Wilson Presents… SMiLE. The album earned Wilson his first Grammy for a recording, which was followed by his second Grammy win for producing The Beach Boys’ acclaimed 2011 release, The SMiLE Sessions. With his own band, Wilson has performed major, sold-out tours in recent years, and with The Beach Boys, he celebrated the iconic band’s 50th anniversary in 2012 with a major international tour and acclaimed studio album, That’s Why God Made The Radio. In 2015, Wilson released his latest solo album No Pier Pressure (Capitol) and was the subject of the critically acclaimed, award-winning biopic Love & Mercy (Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate). The culmination of these projects produced Wilson’s first Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song (Motion Picture) for his song “One Kind Of Love” featured in the film.
Blondie Chaplin is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Originally from South Africa, with Zulu and British heritage, Blondie has released three solo albums, most recently, Between Us, in 2006. He is the vocalist, songwriter, and lead guitar player with Skollie, a band formed with fellow South Africans Keith Lentin, on bass, and Anton Fig (of the Late Show With David Letterman band), on drums. For fifteen years, Blondie recorded and toured with the Rolling Stones, starting with the 1997 album, Bridges to Babylon. His credits on the album include backing vocals, tambourine, piano, bass guitar, percussion, shaker, and maracas. He performed on subsequent tours and albums, including A Bigger Bang and Forty Licks. In late 2013, Blondie appeared as a guest artist, along with Taj Mahal and Boz Skaggs, in the Los Lobos 40thAnniversary Tour shows held at the Fillmore, in San Francisco. Blondie appeared as a special guest with the Brian Wilson group starting in summer 2015 both in support of the latest album and then to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of the Pet Sounds album by the Beach Boys. They toured Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Israel in spring 2016, going on to shows in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, before returning to the U.S. to continue the tour.
Alan (aka “Al”) Jardine, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, is best known for being one of the founding members of the California-based group The Beach Boys. Al, an accomplished musician on a variety of stringed instruments, played mainly rhythm guitar and sang harmony vocals with The Beach Boys. He sang lead on their No. 1 hit “Help Me, Rhonda” and also wrote or co-wrote a good number of songs, most notably on the albums Holland, Carl and the Passions–So Tough, Surf’s Up, and Sunflower. Al continued to tour with The Beach Boys throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and left the band after Carl Wilson’s passing in 1998. In 2001, Al released a live album called Live in Las Vegas, under the name “Al Jardine’s Family & Friends,” and then his own solo album in 2010, A Postcard From California, which featured guest appearances from Neil Young, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Steve Miller, Glen Campbell, Gerry Beckley & Dewey Bunnell (America), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) and Alec Baldwin, plus all the remaining Beach Boys, including the late Carl Wilson. In 2001, Al was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy as a member of The Beach Boys. In 2016, Al joined Brian Wilson for the 50thanniversary celebration and final performance in its entirety of Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys’ timeless masterpiece featuring “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows” and “Sloop John B” (one of Al’s favorite songs, originally recorded by The Kingston Trio).
M. Ward’s new album, More Rain, was released in March of 2016 on Merge Records. Ward has released a string of acclaimed solo albums over the past several years, along with five LPs with Zooey Deschanel as She & Him and a 2009 collaborative album with My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis under the moniker Monsters of Folk. In addition to his celebrated work as a musician, Ward is an accomplished producer, handling those duties forsuch luminaries as Mavis Staples, Jenny Lewis, and Carlos Forster as well as his own musical projects. This album, Ward’s eighth solo affair, finds the artist picking up the tempo and volume a bit from his previous release, 2012’s A Wasteland Companion. Where that record introspectively looked in from the outside, More Rain finds Ward on the inside, gazing out. Begun four years ago and imagined initially as a DIY doo-wop album that would featureWard experimenting with layering his own voice, it soon branched out in different directions, a move that he credits largely to his collaborators here who include R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Neko Case, k.d. lang, The Secret Sisters, and Joey Spampinato of NRBQ. The result is a collection of upbeat, sonically ambitious yet canonically familiar songs that both propel Ward’s reach and satisfy longtime fans.
BRIAN WILSON PERFORMS PET SOUNDS with AL JARDINE & BLONDIE CHAPLIN
M. WARD
KCRW DJ Anne Litt
Sunday, July 10, 2016
7 PM
HOLLYWOOD BOWL
2301 N. Highland Ave,
Los Angeles, CA 90068
TICKETS:
Subscriptions and single tickets for performances during the Hollywood Bowl 2016 summer season are available online hereor via credit card phone order at 323.850.2000, and in person at the Hollywood Bowl Box Office.
For further details or questions, call 323.850.2000 from 10am – 6pm daily.
