Grammy-nominated musical artist Jai Uttal returns after two decades to the Rio Theatre, playing Saturday, Sept. 27 with his band, The Pagan Love Orchestra.

This rare showing comes at a time when Uttal is getting his house in order, literally.

“The Santa Cruz show is kind of a one-off, because we, my wife and I, just moved from the Bay Area to Grass Valley,” Uttal says from his new home. “I’m going to be doing a small tour at the end of October. But this is more like a return to Santa Cruz. I used to live there, and I haven’t played in Santa Cruz [without The Pagan Love Orchestra] since before the pandemic.”

In 1997, Uttal brought forth his vision of The Pagan Love Orchestra. It was/is a mash-up of myriad styles of music, including Indian music, rock, jazz, reggae, ska, samba and jazz. The band has had up to a dozen members—and Uttal, who is himself classically trained on the piano, only works with the best.

“My idea, you could call it a vision, came out of places that I’ve been to in India,” says Uttal, who has traveled the world sharing his music.

“In the villages, in the mountains particularly, there would be gatherings, and all these people would come together. I also saw it in Bengal, in West Bengal, where people, all these people, would get together and they all knew the same songs. But they all knew them slightly differently, and they just didn’t care and would play all these beautiful songs together. That was kind of the original vision for The Pagan Love Orchestra,” Uttal reflects.

The now silver-haired composer took the concepts and structures of devotional songs, and spiritual songs, and to ensure that his band kept things loose, they would only rehearse once. Since the first album with The Pagan Love Orchestra, Shiva Station in 1997, the band has evolved.

“I think I was a little too controlling at first,” Uttal admits. “As we evolved, I became less controlling and more honoring and respectful, and grateful, of the incredible musical talents working with me.”

When questioned about what the goal is in his music, Uttal is quick to answer, “It’s about having more spaciousness, more love and more compassion.”

At the Santa Cruz show, the arrangements are like a “loose sarong,” Uttal explains. “A loose shirt over a skeleton. The arrangement is the skeleton, but everything else is very fluid. And the songs themselves are all Kirtan call-and-response, chanting songs. They’re mantra songs. But there’s nothing monotonous about it.”

Kirtan is the thousands-of-years-old style of devotional call-and-response. Listening to Uttal, whose voice sounds like a Middle Eastern Bob Dylan, it’s easy to get swept up in the music, and find that one’s mind quiets. It’s like yoga for the brain. An antidote to the million miles a second constant rush we find ourselves in.

Uttal is an artist who absorbs the influences around him and spins them into a new fabric. Like a weaver whose loom contains yarn of all the different genres of music, The Pagan Love Orchestra is a psychedelic dashiki.

The music also acts as a vehicle to another space. “Whether it’s a solo concert or a concert with a full band, I’m inviting that transporting energy for myself and for the audience. I invite the audience to respond to my singing, to sing back to me. So it’s very interactional,” says the musical time traveler.

It’s truly the magic of music that it is able to transport you to another place—but so much depends on the intention of the band. In the case of Jai Uttal, the intention is transcendence.

“It’s like a wave comes over us and transports us to someplace that’s not like someplace we’ve ever been,” Uttal tries to explain. “It’s not someplace we’re ever going to be at again. It’s not nostalgic. It’s not recreating a previous experience. It’s a wave of unity.”

Once the dust settles from the uprooting and replanting, and with over 20 albums in his catalogue, there is a new live album on the horizon. “I’m just kind of still figuring it all out. like, okay, where’s the silverware?” Uttal laughs.

Jai Uttal and The Pagan Love Orchestra will play at 8pm on Saturday, Sept. 27 at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $30. Find more information at riotheatre.com.

Salt might be the new album by Santa Cruz four-piece psychedelic surf outfit, Trestles, but don’t let that fool you. Some of these songs hail from the time of their 2022 debut, Halfway Up the Hill.

“There are songs as old as that,” confirms lead singer and guitar player Hunter Kelly. “And then there are songs that were written a week before they were recorded. It was an ongoing project. Not all the songs were written in the studio and a lot were scrapped along the way.”

To celebrate their long-awaited sophomore full-length, Trestles is throwing a record release show at the Catalyst on Saturday, Sept. 27 with friends Career Woman and Ladders. For the latter of the two bands, this will be a reunion show since Ladders’ indefinite hiatus in 2023.

“We desperately begged them,” laughs Trestles drummer Malena Clark. She says that, coincidentally, all of the members of Ladders were planning to be in town the weekend of the show. The two bands essentially “grew up” in the local scene together and often played shows with one another around town.

“It only felt right,” she says. “This is one of our biggest shows in town so it feels right doing it with the people we started with.”

On the day of the show, Collective Santa Cruz is hosting a pre-listening party at Humble Sea—where patrons can also purchase one of four different vinyl record variants of Salt—along with an after party (details on Collective’s Instagram).

Formed in 2020, Trestles fits into a Santa Cruz music scene dubbed “Santa Cruz surf punk” by Grammy-winning music producer Jim Wirt of Santa Cruz Recording Studios, who recorded and produced Salt. Along with Trestles and Ladders, other bands include Sluttony (now located in Los Angeles), Career Woman, Hearsing and several others that hit the ground running playing live shows shortly after the Covid-19 lockdowns lifted.

Earlier this year, Sean Rusev wrote a cover story for GT about the frantic nature of survival for these bands in a rapidly changing, ever-expensive beach town that heavily featured Trestles and their back story. So for those who haven’t read it, bookmark this article, go check it out, then come back. … OK, got the history? Good. And we continue…

After the release of Halfway Up the Hill, Trestles wanted to keep the momentum going, knowing they would be back in the studio to record another full-length. So last February they dropped the Postcard EP as a way to remind fans they aren’t going anywhere.

However, it also served as a great segue between Halfway and Salt, maintaining the fun, upbeat feeling of the former while introducing fans to a bit of the band’s darker side with songs like “The Beach Betrayed Me.”

“[Salt] is a darker album than before,” Kelly says. “Think of it like a book: the plot and setting have stayed the same—we get to live in California and beach town life is good—but it’s a little more cynical lyrically and takes a look at the negative side of having fun all the time.”

The newest single, “Babylon,” or the unreleased “Get a Grip” are examples of these more mature, darker songs in the band’s repertoire. Don’t get it twisted: Salt is still a fast-paced, catchy album from start to finish that’s as infectiously addicting as a fresh bag of chips. It’s impossible to just listen to one track, or even the album in its entirety, only one time.

“Hunter did a really good job on the lyrics for ‘Babylon,’” says bassist Sophia Wall. “It’s groovy but I also think it’s in the direction we’re going toward.”

“Defintely,” agrees Clark. “We also have more punk songs. ‘Get A Grip’ is really fast, hard and fun to play live. I have a great time with that one!”

But for rhythm guitar player Jackson Jones, it’s with the older songs that he finds more satisfaction. Like the album’s third single, “Esplanade.”

“Hunter had that riff and I thought, ‘Oh, we have to do something with that,’” he explains. “But It took years to finish and every couple of months we wrote new parts for it. We were going to debut it at a Catalyst show years ago but it had a weird jam at the end we ended up scrapping.”

For now, Trestles is gearing up to complete the end of their album release tour with a few select dates after they rock the Catalyst. They say they’ll most likely announce a few more sprinkled in, and after a nice holiday break, they’ll be ready to roll up their sleeves once more.

“It’s time to start working again,” Clark says.

Trestles is playing three shows Saturday, Sept. 27: 11am–5pm at Humble Sea Brewing Co. (820 Swift St.); 8–11pm at the Catalyst with openers Ladders and Career Woman (1011 Pacific Ave.; $28.88); and 11pm at Santa Cruz Recording (1305 Fair Ave.).

Shortly after waiting out the pandemic, the Lone Bellow found new life and inspiration by commandeering Roy Orbison’s former home at Old Hickory Lake just outside of Nashville for eight weeks during which the quintet recorded Love Songs for Losers, the band’s fifth full-length album.

Recording in Orbison’s former abode provided for its share of surreal moments, especially for Elmquist, who stayed overnight after members of his family contracted COVID-19. (They’re fine now.)

“There was one morning at about 4 o’clock in the morning where I swore that Roy Orbison touched me on the hand,” Elmquist recalled. “It was really spooky, living in this 6,000-square-foot cabin. Even with friends there, it was spooky.”

And while the specter of the late rock and roll icon may have provided some paranormal nuance to the proceedings, it was the self-described “band camp at Orbison’s house” vibe that made for a singular recording experience. It all stemmed from Elmquist rhetorically asking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to write a whole record of love songs?” shortly after the band was done with Half Moon Light. Although it’s not to say that living on top of each other for two months didn’t create some sparks.

“There has to be friction or you can’t make good things—the friction is what makes the good stuff,” Elmquist explained. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. There were some throw-down moments. We’ve had worse—let’s just say that. I really think everybody knew what their role was and just set their mind to it. When we first started talking about this, I was talking to the manager and I didn’t know if it was going to be good or bad because it could go both ways. It was honestly the easiest and most inspiring time to make the record because we got in that space. We moved the studio there and it was free. It was incredible to be able to do that.”

Don’t expect to hear ditties about chasing women, tooling around in a tricked-out pick-up truck or knocking back six-packs. For this go-round, songs like “Gold,” “Cost of Living” and “Wherever Your Heart Is” deal with grown-up topics like opioid addiction, loss and devotion respectively. The complex subject matter for which The Lone Bellow has become known is something Williams proudly affirms as being the key to his band’s persona.

“I have a really hard time defining myself or my band,” he said. “The songs that we write are usually not great for pop radio—I know that.”

While prior albums found the band working with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb (2017’s Walk Into a Storm) and Aaron Dessner of The National (2015’s Then Came the Morning and 2020’s Half Moon Light), The Lone Bellow chose to have Elmquist and Jacob Sooter collaborate on the lion’s share of production work. Williams was also grateful to bring Pipkin and Dorio into the recording process.

“Just using our actual band and drummer—it was just a really inspiring and great time,” he said. “Whenever we would use another producer, there’d always be this conversation where the producer would say, ‘You know, I have this drummer that I really like.’ And we’d be like, ‘Okay.’ We’ve had the same band on the road, especially our drummer, for several years now, so we wanted to feel that mojo in the studio.”

For TLB, a major part of the secret sauce in the group’s success is playing live and connecting with their audience. That exchange will happen plenty of times as The Lone Bellow tours the United States this year.

“I can tell you what’s most important to us at live shows is trying to be in the moment,” Elmquist said. “And feeling the energy of what’s going on in the room and what’s not going on and just trying to be aware of that. We find it an honor that people get babysitters, pay for tickets and make a real night out of coming out to see us play our songs and we hope that they become their songs.

“I don’t think it’s weird to say that we have to protect what we do because we get into a room with people and it’s such a privilege to be able to do it,” he said. “People take the time to see us play and sit for a few hours and we don’t take that lightly. It’s kind of the deal we made with them—if they keep coming, we keep coming. It’s always new. You play a song 1,000 times, but it’s always new because of the people that have made it their songs now.”

And as much as any group, the Lone Bellow are appreciating their ability to tour as normal again after the COVID 19 pandemic.

Like many of their peers, the Nashville-by-way-of-Brooklyn outfit did some streaming to connect with fans before deciding to kick it up a notch by booking a number of Northeast drive-in dates in late 2021, where fans traveled by car to a drive-in and TLB played on stages where movie screen would normally be. And while the initial thought would be that this would be the next best thing to a regular concert experience, for Williams and Elmquist, it turned out to be quite the peculiar and unpleasant experience.

“It sucked real bad and I’d love to never have to play to car windows again for sure,” Williams said. “You’re not allowed to honk so when a song finished, it was just headlights flashing.”

Elmquist added, “People clap with their lights—it’s really weird.”

The Lone Bellow plays at 8pm on Sept. 25 at the Felton Music Hall, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton. $35. feltonmusichall.com