Mesut Ozgen of the Santa Cruz Guitar Orchestra is more than a music conductor. He’s a tough coach. “You can’t leave!” the UCSC music professor tells an orchestra member in the back row as the group practices for its May 17 performance at Kuumbwa. “But I told you,” the musician barks back, “I have a professional rehearsal!”
“One minute,” says Ozgen as intimidating portraits of Beethoven and Mozart glare down from above. “Let’s do the third movement.” On his cue, the mix of amateur and professional musicians pluck their strings, quietly at first, and climax into a building crescendo.
Two things are important in the Santa Cruz Guitar Orchestra: attendance and volume. In weekly rehearsals the group alternates between the kind of gentle melodies that could put a teething child to sleep and roaring movements that might knock listeners out of their chairs. On Tuesday night, the ensemble’s vibrating spruce and ringing rosewood will send melodies resonating through the hall as Ozgen conducts, grasping at the air with each eighth note. “Exploring the potential of the instrument—that’s the important thing,” says Ozgen, a native of Turkey who also holds a PhD in medicine. “Exploring the possibilities.”
The group’s “Dueling Strings” concert will take listeners on a journey from Baroque compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell through 20th-century folk, ragtime and jazz pieces. They will also play an arrangement of movie music from old Westerns and new songs like “Scenes from Ellis Island,” written by Ozgen’s friend Benjamin Verdery.
Ozgen’s orchestra knows how to make a guitar sound like just about anything—a bassoon, a violin section, a snare drum, even a flock of seagulls (achieved by hitting, twisting and pulling all six strings in every way imaginable). Guitar player Sean Hayward, a rising star in the orchestra, used cracking whip sounds in his arrangement of Ennio Morricone’s scores from Clint Eastwood films like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Hayward says the three songs took him 70 hours to disassemble and re-arrange.“It ended up being about 10 minutes long but probably about 50 pages of music,” says Hayward, a second-year UCSC student.
The musicians will send the audience’s hearts thumping hard into intermission with a song written by Gerrald Garcia, or “Jerry,” as Ozgen affectionately calls him. “This is not the ‘Dead’ one,” says Ozgen, smiling at his own joke. “This guy is interesting.”
Garcia, a British chemist who paints watercolors and plays guitar on the side, sent “The Sand Man Cometh” to Ozgen specifically with his orchestra in mind. The percussive piece sounds like two separate rock bands battling each another in a duel to the death. Garcia sent his friend the song because Ozgen’s former UCSC guitar ensemble, currently on budgetary hiatus, did well with another of Garcia’s songs.
The evening will finish with “Scenes from Ellis Island,” a musical tale of New York City’s bustling gateway to the United States from 1892 to 1934. If immigrants failed a health inspection, they might be sent home across the Atlantic Ocean, 4,000 miles away from those family members with whom they’d made the arduous journey.
“It’s history,” says Ozgen, himself an immigrant. The hypnotic climax incorporates Western melodies over what Ozgen calls a “cowstail rhythm,” which changes time signatures and rapidly decreases beats with every other bar—from six beats to five to four, three and two—before starting over again. “It makes the whole audience like—standing ovation,” says Ozgen, smiling again.
“Scenes from Ellis Island” is filled with guitar effects simulating squawking birds, falling coins and rattling drums. Meanwhile, electric guitarists, singers and other guest musicians will swarm audience members from all sides in a musical bombardment to make them feel like they can’t escape—not that they would ever want to. Like the musicians, the audience is along for the ride.
“He is certainly a master,” says orchestra member Hayward of Ozgen. “He’s one of my favorite guitarists ever. So it’s great to have the opportunity to work with him.”
SANTA CRUZ GUITAR ORCHESTRA
Tuesday, 7:30pm
Kuuumbwa, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz
$20 general/$18 seniors/$15 students
