Santa Monica College offers free percussion concert for all audiences

A free, midday concert at Santa Monica College gave the local percussion scene something more useful than a standard recital: a live look at how ensemble playing actually holds together. The SMC Percussion Ensemble performed Friday, May 15, from 1 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. in The Music Hall at the SMC Performing Arts Center, with free parking and seating available on a first-arrival basis.

The setting mattered. With no ticket cost and a daytime slot on the Santa Monica College main campus, the performance was easy to reach for students, teachers and working players who might not make a night show. The college listed the event as free music, and the concert was framed around percussion music across a bold mix of styles, the kind of program that rewards close listening as much as flash.

For drummers and percussion students, that makes the concert valuable beyond the stagecraft. Ensemble percussion demands control of dynamics, precise timing, texture changes and clean coordination across multiple instruments, from concert drums to mallets and auxiliary setups. Those are the same skills that separate a solid part from a convincing performance, and they are often easier to hear in a college ensemble than in a solo practice room.

Megumi Smith led the group and brought the kind of pedagogy that makes a concert feel like part performance, part lesson. Smith teaches beginning percussion classes, percussion ensemble, music fundamentals and private lessons at Santa Monica College. She also serves on faculty at California State University, Dominguez Hills and Youth Orchestra Los Angeles at Heart of Los Angeles, or YOLA @ HOLA.

Her background helps explain the community feel around the concert. A native of Tokyo, Smith moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to pursue a master’s degree in percussion performance at California State University, Northridge. Her performing history includes work at the Hollywood Bowl with Los Tigres del Norte and on Los Angeles Philharmonic neighborhood concerts with Gustavo Dudamel.

Santa Monica College’s spring music calendar showed the Percussion Ensemble concert alongside an Annual Family Concert scheduled for Saturday, May 16, also in The Music Hall. Taken together, the schedule pointed to a busy end-of-semester stretch, but the percussion concert stood out for one simple reason: it put a public, no-cost ensemble in front of anyone willing to sit down and listen closely.