edited by Jodi Summers
Woohoo! The Santa Monica Twilight Dance Series is 30 years old this summer…and as always…the City is sharing another summer of free music Thursdays on the historic Santa Monica Pier. Dance or get your feet wet and hear some excellent music. The summer of 2014 brings these fine acts…
7/10 - Cults w/ James Supercave + KCRW DJ Marion Hodges - Cults has always been a band to look to both past and present. When the young duo arrived on the New York scene in 2010 their debut effort was described as "Phil Spector with hip-hop sensibilities, Glee soaked in reverb."
7/17 - Yuna w/ King + KCRW DJ Anthony Valadez - Yuna has risen from regional D.I.Y. notoriety to full-on international stardom. In the process, this young 
singer-songwriter from Malaysia has become the first artist from her homeland to conquer the American market.
7/24 - Cayucas / Papa + KCRW DJ Chris Muckley - An avid bird-watcher, Yudin majored in both Music Theory/Production and Japanese. He spent a post-grad year living and teaching in Tokyo, then taking the past couple of years to hone the sound of Cayucas. He posted a couple of songs online, picking up a lot of love and attention, but it was only when he entered the studio with producer/multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift last year that Cayucas was truly defined — sun-inspired jams that touch 
upon The Animals, Harry Belafonte and the surfer-folk mysticism of the Northwest.
7/31 - Omar Souleyman + KCRW DJ Aaron Byrd - Born in 1966, Souleyman grew up in Ra's al'-Ayn, a Syrian town in the northeastern region of Jazeera. That's where he first heard Syrian folk music played on a long-necked lute called a bozouki and rebab, a single-stringed fiddle. He enlisted Rizan Sa'id from a local Kurdish combo in 1996. The pair electrified Souleyman's acoustic music – playing it harder, faster, louder, and more thrilling than ever before. He became an increasingly prominent act on the local wedding circuit, eventually generating an estimated 500 bootleg 
recordings and plenty of wild YouTube videos.
8/07 - Jagwar Ma + KCRW DJ Jason Bentley - Jagwar Ma is a musical project, est. Nov 2011 by Jono Ma and Gabriel Winterfield. The Sydney based kraut-experiment that was “a band without members” and a stage of revolving musicians.
8/14 - La Santa Cecilia w/ Sergio Mendoza Y La Orkestra + KCRW DJ Raul Campos - a Santa Cecilia consists of accordionist and requintero Jose “Pepe” Carlos, bassist Alex Bendana, percussionist Miguel Ramirez, and lead vocalist La Marisoul, whose captivating voice sings about love, loss and heartbreak. Their influences range from Miles Davis to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin to Janis Joplin and Mercedes Sosa to Ramon Ayala. Their common love of music and openness to all genres led them to the concept of La Santa Cecilia in 2007 – named after the patron saint of musicians.
8/21 - The Zombies w/ Mystic Braves + KCRW DJ Dan Wilcox - The second UK group following the Beatles to score a #1 hit in America, The Zombies infiltrated the airwaves with the sophisticated melodies, breathy vocals, choral back-up harmonies and jazzy keyboard riffs of their 1960’s hit singles like “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season,” Their swan-song album “Odessey & Oracle” was recently ranked #100 in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”
8/28 - Lee “Scratch” Perry w/ Mexico 68 + KCRW DJ Jeremy Sole - "I’m an artist, a musician, a magician, a writer, a 
singer; I’m everything. My name is Lee from the African jungle, originally from West Africa. I’m a man from somewhere else, but my origin is from Africa, straight to Jamaica through reincarnation; reborn in Jamaica..." .. .. Lee "Scratch" Perry (born Rainford Hugh Perry, on March 20, 1936, in Kendal, Jamaica) is a Grammy award-winning reggae and dub artist, who has been highly influential in the development and acceptance of reggae and dub music in Jamaica and overseas. Arguably the first creatively driven, "artist-producer" in modern recorded music, Lee "Scratch" Perry occupies the highest 
level of music making - standing comfortably next to pioneers like George Martin, Phil Spector, and Brian Wilson.
9/04 - OK Go w/ Allah-Las - Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation. Drawn from the same marching orders issued to big-hearted happiness creators as Queen, T. Rex, The Cars or Cheap Trick, and a lifetime of mixed tapes exchanged by lifelong music fans, their most recent release, Upside Out, is a reaffirmation of the sounds and ideas that brought the band together in the first place.
9/11- Charles Bradley w/ King James & The Special Men - Other artists appreciate their audiences, just as many are grateful for them, but few artists love their fans as much and as sincerely as Charles Bradley. By now, his remarkable, against-all-odds rise has been well-documented – how he transcended a bleak life on the streets and struggled through a series of ill-fitting jobs – most famously as a James Brown impersonator at Brooklyn clubs – before finally being discovered by Daptone's Gabriel Roth. His recent music esges closer into the kind of psychedelic soul The Temptations explored in the early '70s. "I've been calling it 'New Direction Daptone. People are not going to expect this. There's a lot of psych influences on this record, a lot of fuzz guitar. We're pushing the band & the arrangements further out, which in turns has to make Charles go further out."
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http://santamonicapier.org/twilightconcerts/
http://www.santamonicapropertyblog.com/?p=5642
http://lovesiliconbeach.wordpress.com/2014/06/28/dancing-on-the…series-is-here/
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