Golden Hour at the Norton Simon

On the last Friday in May, the Sculpture Garden trades its usual reverent hush for a genuine jazz quartet — and for once, the timing is exactly right.
There is a particular quality to late afternoon in Pasadena, when the light turns the color of weak tea and good bourbon at the same time, and the Norton Simon’s sculpture garden does its best impression of a place where nothing has ever gone wrong. The Rodins stand around looking unbothered. The lily pond holds still. Behind it all, Colorado Boulevard keeps doing what boulevards do, and you, mercifully, are no longer part of that. The museum has decided — sensibly, generously — to put a soundtrack to the whole arrangement.
The conceit is called Golden Hour: Music in the Garden, and it unfolds on select Fridays from May through August in the newly renovated Sculpture Garden. It is programmed by the bassist Masatoshi Sato, who, in a tidy bit of efficiency that I find almost moving, also performs in it. There is something to be admired in a curator who books the room and then has to stand in it and deliver. No hiding behind the lineup when you are the lineup.
On Friday, May 29, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., the program is a jazz quartet — and I want to be precise about the word jazz, because cultural institutions have a way of promising it and then producing something closer to a scented candle. This is the real article. Sato takes the bass. Joe Santa Maria plays saxophone, Jamie Rosenn is on guitar, and Trevor Anderies is behind the drums. These are not garnish musicians, hired to fill the air at a polite volume. They are working players from the same Los Angeles jazz ecosystem — the world of rooms like Sam First and the late, beloved Blue Whale, of the LA Jazz Collective, of bands with names like Slumgum and JoE-LeSs shOe that you suspect were chosen partly to test the resolve of anyone writing about them.
Anderies alone carries the kind of résumé that should reassure you about how the evening will go: a drummer who has played behind Bennie Maupin and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and who, when he is not touring Europe, teaches the next batch of them at Los Angeles City College. Rosenn has spent two decades as one of the city’s quietly essential guitarists, the sort other musicians call first. Put them in a garden, hand the audience a glass of wine and a sketch pad, and you have something that sounds suspiciously like a real night out, dressed up as a casual one.
That casualness is the whole trick, and the Norton Simon plays it well. There is no ticket beyond admission, no assigned seat, no expectation that you arrive having read anything. You buy a light bite and a drink from the Garden Café — which keeps a happy-hour wine menu for the occasion — collect a set of drawing supplies if the mood strikes, and find a spot in the garden to be a person for two hours. The museum recommends it for visitors of all ages, which is its gracious way of saying nobody will look at you sideways for bringing a child, a date, or simply yourself.
It helps that the venue is having a year. The Norton Simon turns fifty in 2026 — its golden anniversary, a coincidence the museum is too tasteful to belabor and I am not — which lends the whole Golden Hour enterprise a faint, pleasing rhyme. While you are there, the galleries are showing Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer, on view through July 20, so the evening can begin or end with a walk past some of the best European and Asian art on the West Coast, depending on how the wine goes.
This is also, frankly, the kind of programming that justifies an entire radio frequency. A straight-ahead quartet playing standards and originals as the sun drops behind the San Gabriels is the precise thing Southern California’s jazz station has been broadcasting into our cars for decades. To get it live, outdoors, for the cost of a museum ticket, in a garden full of Henry Moores, is the sort of bargain this region occasionally offers and rarely advertises.
Go. Bring someone. Sketch a Rodin badly. Let four good musicians remind you that the best hour of the day was named correctly.

If You Go
• What: Golden Hour: Music in the Garden — jazz quartet (Joe Santa Maria, saxophone; Jamie Rosenn, guitar; Masatoshi Sato, bass; Trevor Anderies, drums)
• When: Friday, May 29, 2026, 4:30–6:30 p.m.
• Where: Norton Simon Museum, Sculpture Garden, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
• Cost: Free with museum admission; no reservations required
• Good to know: Garden Café offers light bites and a happy-hour wine menu; drop-in drawing supplies available; seating is first come, first served; all ages welcome
• While you’re there: Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer, on view through July 20, 2026