Signature Series I, Season Opener: Artistic Director's Concert. Sky Island Spirits

If you live in Oracle or have spent time here, you know that our community is a remarkable Sky Island: a lush, cool ecological archipelago rising above a hot desert sea. Teeming with its own unique flora and fauna, this landscape is unlike any other in the world and is one of the reasons so many consider Oracle to be a paradise.

Featuring Homero Ceron on vibraphone, Arthur Vint of the Century Room on percussion, and Stephen Cook on piano, our Season Opener captures a distinctive mid-century American vision of "the islands," born from fantasy and imagination. Journey with us through the exotic 'rum rhapsodies' of tiki villages, magical temples, and distant fantasy lands.

Alongside my newly composed works, this musical adventure will feature music by Martin Denny, Les Baxter, and an early precursor to exotica by Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, Griffes' The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan reveals that the fascination with imagined, faraway worlds existed long before the exotica movement of the 1950s.

We'll see you in Xanadu on October 25!