This won’t take long, did it?
Closing Night is at hand in the free Summer Music Concert series in the Dale Jones Courtyard at City Hall, and when mistress of the blues Missy Andersen steps to the microphone at 7 o’clock, the audience may wish it won’t end.
What her fans seem to like best is that the singer-songwriter serves up from both sides of the plate, sadness, a style for which blues’ artists were born, and joy.
After journeying from her native Detroit to Queens to San Diego – does that sound like a double play combination? — Ms. Andersen has risen to stardom by faithfully following that formula sad and happy formula.
With Heine Andersen, her husband/bandleader/guitarist, Ms. Andersen produced “In the Moment,” one of the hottest albums of 2014. She wrote eight of the 11 tracks.
This summer, for the first time, every act was making its Summer Concert series debut.
Producer Gary Mandell of Boulevard Music, who has been organizing concerts since 1976, was in a whimsical mood as the Closing Night approached.
Mr. Mandell is plenty sentimental, but he was not in a mood to look back over the season’s first five weeks or even next year, when Culver City’s Centennial will be coming down to its last couple of months.
Although he has been producing the concert series since the turn of the century, Mr. Mandell preferred not to talk about next year. Will there even be one for him? The City Council’s rehiring of him every year tastes like a soap opera.
“I am not that pompous to think they are going to rehire me,” Mr. Mandell said.
