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DJ Kid Koala presents his puppet, film, stage robot mashup in SF - SF Chronicle

http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/DJ-Kid-Koala-presents-his-puppet-film-stage-11748062.php

By Andrew Gilbert

August 10, 2017

Like many a writer working on his first book, Kid Koala, the Montreal DJ, graphic artist and dauntless sonic spelunker, figured he should stick to what he knows.

Back in 2000, the fuzzy-costumed Kid Koala, whose real name is Eric San, made a powerful first impression with “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” (Ninja Tune). The dexterously handcrafted, slyly grooving album wove together hundreds of sampled LP’s and came with a comic book he drew, inserted to serve as liner notes.

He then ended up opening for global acts like Björk and Radiohead, and before long Toronto’s proudly indie ECW Press approached him about publishing a book on any topic he wanted — “which was the worst thing you could tell me,” says the 42-year-old, speaking from his home in Montreal.

“I thought maybe I’d write a handbook about touring as a DJ, about how to rent a turntable and do laundry on the road. I got two paragraphs in and realized this is the most horrible book ever. What did I get myself into? My default was to go sit in a diner and draw all over the place mats, and there was this reoccurring robot character.”

Conceived while San toured with Dan “the Automator” Nakamura’s Lovage project, the robot became the central character of his 2003 graphic novel “Nufonia Must Fall,” which has evolved into the singular puppet-show-cum-live-film that opens a four-night run at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium on Thursday, Aug. 10. Created in collaboration with K.K. Barrett, the Academy Award-nominated production designer of choice for Spike Jonze, “Nufonia” is like watching a masterly magic show that’s all the more breathtaking because the sleights of hand are readily visible.

Told via 10-inch puppets on meticulously detailed sets, “Nufonia” tells the simple story of a besotted robot, out of work after being replaced by a more advanced machine, attempting to woo a brainy young woman who works in an office. The audience can watch the puppet story unfold onscreen, strikingly rendered with the deep shadows of film noir, while also viewing the cast of puppeteers, known as the Afiara Quartet, and production crew creating the film in real time.

Since premiering in Toronto in June 2015, the production has become increasingly intricate, with more than 40 puppets, five cameras and 20 distinct sets. And like the graphic novel, “Nufonia Must Fall” eschews language. It’s a cross between a sci-fi fairy tale and a coming-of-age story “about a robot who can’t sing trying to write authentic love songs,” San explains. “He ends up using some old technology and sound effects records.”

If the synopsis sounds like the backstory of a certain cutting-edge turntablist, San admits that “Nufonia” is fairly autobiographical with an emotional core gleaned from a case of “heavy college heartbreak.” But the vehicles he employs to tell the story draw on earlier sources of inspiration, including his childhood obsession with Jim Henson’s Muppets.

“If you go further back, I remember the first time I realized watching Charlie Chaplin that what I’m seeing onscreen is a magic trick,” San says. “He’s not really climbing up the wall. The cinema allowed him to create this fantastic world.”

San’s affinity for film put him in the thick of the action in the recent hit movie “Baby Driver,” where he supplied the mixtape soundtrack for actor Ansel Elgort’s get-away specialist. When writer/director Edgar Wright approached him about creating the titular character’s self-made tapes, in which Baby Driver remixes conversations he’s surreptitiously recorded, “I told him, ‘You’re describing my high school existence,’” San says.

“Once the weekend came, I’d work with my four-track deck literally until dawn, making weird mixtapes, finding disparate spoken words things and Frankensteining them into these pieces that would crack me up,” he continues. “It was very much part of my introspective youth.”

As an adult, San has found little trouble turning skills honed in solitude into musical camaraderie. He might be best known in the Bay Area for his work with Deltron 3030, the influential alt-hip hop triumvirate with Del the Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator, created in 1999.

Nakamura, who watched “Nufonia” evolve from a doodle to a graphic novel to a show calls it “truly amazing.”

“We were rooming together during the Lovage tour when he was drawing the book, and it’s great to see how he pulls together the live puppetry and music so impeccably. It’s high tech and old timey at same time,” Nakamura says. “Basically, the robot is Eric. Emotionally, they come from the same place.”

Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer.

Kid Koala: 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, Aug. 10-13. $25-$55. SFJazz Center’s Miner Auditorium, 201 Franklin St., S.F. (866) 920-5299. www.sfjazz.org

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John Luther Adams - Soundscapes inspired by nature - Bay Area Reporter

http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=music&article=1601

Soundscapes inspired by nature

Music

Published 08/03/2017

by Philip Campbell

SFJAZZ recently devoted week three of its "Summer Sessions" to the music of Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams. The series was performed in various locations around the city, including an outdoor event at Sutro Baths, but the most intimate encounters took place within the warm and sociable confines of the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley.

Beginning with "Listening Party w/John Luther Adams" last Wednesday, the celebration of the profoundly original composer's work offered a comprehensive opportunity to experience the astonishing range of his inspiration.

Awards for the big orchestral score "Become Ocean" and percussion piece "Inuksuit" have already alerted audiences to his extraordinary vision. Public performances in unusual settings have further revealed his ability for creating uniquely immersive soundscapes.

"Veils and Vespers" sound installation was part of the recent Festival, presented in the vast acoustic of Grace Cathedral. The four-part electronic work evolves organically over six hours and allows listeners to explore on their own, coming and going at will, to create an individual encounter.

"Inuksuit" also embodies the composer's main concept of "sonic geography," fully deserving its career-making recognition as his definitive composition. Last Sunday, Adams' ultimate immersive musical experience was performed in the ruins of the Sutro Baths in the Lands End area of western San Francisco.

As many as 99 percussionists are placed alone or in groups in open-air sites ranging from city parks to meadows – and in SF, perhaps most wonderfully of all, at a haunted spot near the ocean. Named for human-shaped stones built by natives of the Arctic to mark significant places, JLA's "Inuksuit" also lets audiences create a personal experience. Like "Veils and Vespers," listeners move at their own pace throughout the area. Signposts in both works may act as guides, but each listener will derive their own meaning.

That Zen-like spirit informs Adams' string quartets most intensely. The composer said he never thought he would be interested in the genre until, of course, he was. His interest was better self-described as "curiosity," and before he knew it, he had written three!

In a boldly adventurous move, SFJAZZ brought the JACK Quartet, famed for their devotion to contemporary works by living composers, to Robert N. Miner Auditorium, to play all of the quartets and give the U.S. premiere of a fourth, "Everything That Rises," a new work composed by Adams specifically for them.

All of JLA's artistic influences, from Thoreau to artist Richard Serra and composers from Debussy to Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, are distilled in the quartets. The precisely articulate Adams paraphrased another's words in concluding that the work eventually becomes the sum of its influences.

As so many composers have discovered, the string quartet can be the most useful vehicle for profound personal utterance, but again, Adams leaves a lot to the listener's imagination. He also has a poet's gift for giving his works evocative and perfectly appropriate titles. "The Wind in High Places" is the first in the cycle, and despite the technique and compositional craft involved, it really does take you there.

Without an essential need to understand his ways and means, Adams still added greatly to our appreciation with his characteristically concise opening explanations. As in sitting meditation (there's that spiritual feeling again), one can simply mind walk through the rarefied atmosphere. The focus and concentration of the musicians creates an exquisite and seemingly timeless soundscape, and we are transfixed.

Other works played by the JACK Quartet included "The Dream of the Canyon Wren," "Canticles of the Sky" and "Untouched." The youthful musicians were persuasive advocates and virtuosic interpreters. Once more the titles said it all, though "Canticles" and "Dream" are more programmatic in nature. In "Untouched" (Second String Quartet), the fingers of the players do not touch the fingerboard. The music contains no normal stopped tones, producing sound "either as natural harmonics or on open strings" (JLA).

After 38 years in Alaska, you may take the man out of the wilderness, but you can't take the wilderness out of the man. Nature and spirit inform every magical page of Adams' music, and the premiere performance of "Everything That Rises" last Friday showed the powerful effect of all his formative influences.

For an hour, the rapt audience was immersed in strands of sound rising at intervals growing progressively smaller. It could be the sound of paint drying to a detractor, but composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman also knew the almost painful beauty of slow musical evolution and the silence between the notes.

Adams brings to mind, with transcendent concentration, the atmosphere of Feldman's own "Rothko Chapel" and even the dying strands of Mahler's Ninth. "Everything That Rises" takes us to a very still place within. Mere words cannot describe it, but music can conjure it. Something tells me John Luther Adams' "sounds in the air" may well be an answer to a famous koan.

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‘Cosmic Jazz’ Big Band Visits San Francisco

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/08/03/cosmic-jazz-big-band-visits-san-francisco/

‘Cosmic Jazz’ Big Band Visits San Francisco

August 3, 2017 2:00 AM

By Dave Pehling

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Though their leader may have left this earthly plane almost a quarter of a century ago, the Sun Ra Arkestra continues to spread its namesake’s unique gospel of experimental big-band jazz, theatrical stage performance and his pioneering vision of “Afrofuturism.” Born Herman “Sonny” Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, he took to music at a young age, studying classical piano before moving to Chicago while still in his teens.

Blount would tour playing piano as a sideman by the time he reached his 20s, eventually working with blues singer Wynonie Harris and as Fletcher Henderson’s pianist and arranger before reinventing himself in the late 1940s. Taking on the name Sun Ra and claiming he had traveled from Saturn to spread a message of peace through music, the pianist would found his Space Trio and start writing songs that moved beyond Ra’s roots in swing, stride piano and bebop towards a new sound.

During the ’50s, Ra was joined by two of his most important disciples — tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen — and rechristened his growing ensemble the Arkestra as they explored a style of collective improvisation that make the pianist a pioneer of both free jazz and the early adoption of electronic keyboards. He also began releasing his music via his own label Saturn Records and, by the end of the decade, the band had adopted it’s trademark Egyptian-meets-science-fiction stage costumes that only added to the sprawling group’s mystique.

In the years that followed, Sun Ra and his Arkestra built themselves a global following with it’s ecstatic, exploratory sound and otherworldly live performances. The group moved to New York City and live there communally, finding an audience among beat poets and early fans of psychedelia during the ’60s with an extended residency at Slug’s Saloon. The group would later relocate to Philadelphia, where the Arkestra kept its home base for much of its existence.

Touring and recording prolifically through the ’70s, Sun Ra and companyrefined their mix of traditional swing (Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson standards had long been part of the group’s repertoire) with out there improv, theatrics, dance and African percussion. The musician also branched out into film, co-writing the script for the apocalyptic Afrofuturist science fiction film Space is the Place that was shot in San Francisco and Oakland in 1972 and released two years later. Destined to become a cult classic, the surreal movie features protagonist Ra facing off against the evil Overseer in a card game to decide the future of the black race.

By the ’80s and into the early ’90s, the group remained a popular touring attraction and jazz festival performer, delivering its unique spectacle to a new generation of fans. Even after Ra’s passing in 1993, the Arkestra remained a vital ensemble under the leadership of saxophonist and frequent featured soloist John Gilmore, though he would die two years later.

Since then, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen (a member of the Arkestra for nearly 60 years) has served as the group’s musical director and guiding light to continue to preserve Sun Ra’s remarkable musical legacy. The group returns to San Francisco for the first time since 2013, playing a highly anticipated four-night run at the SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium as part of the center’s Summer Sessions series.

Sun Ra Arkestra Thursday-Sunday, Aug. 3-6, 7:30 p.m. $25-$65 SFJAZZ Center

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Lands End hillside becomes concert hall for Adams’ ‘Inuksuit’ - SF Chronicle

http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/garchik/article/Lands-End-hillside-becomes-concert-hall-for-11725937.php

Lands End hillside becomes concert hall for Adams’ ‘Inuksuit’

By Leah Garchik

August 2, 2017

On the Coastal Trail at Lands End, the site of a free open-air performance of John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” on Saturday, July 29, a reverent mob roamed the hillside. The performance, witnessed by thousands of music lovers alongside park-goers who happened to be traipsing around, was part of a six-event SFJazz tribute to the composer, a collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

At the top of the hill, you could look down at the crowd walking from musician to musician, along the crisscrossed pathways splayed on the hillside, and see an image like a Bruegel painting with puffy-jacketed villagers moving through a rural landscape. If one’s glance met the glance of another music lover in the “audience,” one smiled.

Those weren’t the facial expressions of the musicians, some 60 of whom were studying the music, looking at the instruments, seriously focused on the music rather than the crowd. Percussionist Riley Nicholson said after the performance that they’d been asked to try for “the facial expressions you’d have if you were walking down the street with your iPhone’s earphones on,” to reflect an individual response to the music.

As listeners made their way through the crowd from musician to musician, the sound of each overtook the sound of the last; they were playing together, but it was as if they were playing alone. There were no metronomes, no visible conductor waving a baton to keep the beat.

“We were supposed to be thinking about a clock, and 60 seconds,” said Nicholson.

“It felt like public solitude,” added Allen Biggs. “We performed in a place I have known all my life: Lands End. The foghorn, wind, birds, footsteps on gravel added texture to the tapestry of sound.” Biggs said he could see, at one point, that “a whale was spouting beyond Seal Rock. Nobody noticed, as they were watching us playing music.”

“Each player is a soloist, with an underlying pulse of 60 beats to the second,” said composer Adams, who, after the 80-or-so-minute-performance, stood easily answering questions from anyone who approached. The musicians listen to each other, and use that “underlying pulse of 60,” the time of a clock or a heart at rest, to locate themselves in the music.

Adams had written the piece to be performed by any number of musicians divisible by three, from nine to 99, by three families of instruments: air (conches, whirly tubes), metal (triangles, plastic tubing whipped around), drums. “Nothing really represents anything,” said Adams, “except maybe the winds. I wanted the piece to come out of the air.”

The work has been played before, and the composer said he thought that this performance’s opening was “particularly beautiful — one of the best.” A single conch player was joined by another, then the sound of a rock being rubbed against a board, then other instruments joined. It was only at the end, when orchestra bells sent high notes pinging from one to another, that you could hear a melody repeated.

“There’s a culture that’s grown up around the gathering,” said SFJazz Artistic DirectorRandall Kline. “Musicians make it their own.” The Saturday gathering was “more than I had hoped. But he is one of the greatest composers in our time,” Kline added. “And we presented this thing in a beautiful natural setting. Who wouldn’t want to go to that?”

In the parking lot at Lands End, Nancy Friedman said she had seen a car with a bumper sticker that read, “Think about honking if you love conceptual art.” And as we made our way out of the park, a man in the crowd stopped me, smiled and said, “Be sure to write about this one. It was … sacramental.”

P.S. I was among the majority of people in the crowd using their cell phones to capture pictures of this event. Maybe those pictures are handy to show to friends later, to illustrate one’s spoken description. Maybe, for me, the pictures could turn up with the online version of this column. At the same time, after a while, it seemed to me that I could listen and watch much better by letting my memory be the recording device.

Mentally, I can call it up over and over again, listen to a scrap, zoom in to a close-up or zoom out to a long shot. And if anything is ever forgotten ... well, then, I needn’t dredge it up from my phone, because if it’s forgotten, it wasn’t important anyway. As the bumper sticker said, that’s a concept.

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John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” at Lands End on THE REHEARSAL STUDIO Blog

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2017/07/john-luther-adams-inuksuit-at-lands-end.html

SATURDAY, JULY 29, 2017

John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” at Lands End

This afternoon John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” was given the sort of outdoor performance that the composer had intended by virtue of a partnership between SFJAZZ and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. As had been previously observed, this is an open-ended composition whose score pages may be distributed among 9 to 99 percussionists. Taken as a whole, the piece has a three-part structure.

The first section may be said to be “about” air. It involves different approaches to amplifying human breath, but some of the performers play whirly tubes and other objects that only make sound when spun at a rapid pace. All the performers began in a single location and gradually dispersed themselves to a variety of “percussion stations” situated throughout much of Lands End.

This made for a gradual transition into the second section, which consisted primarily of playing drums, cymbals, and gongs. I also heard one of those sirens operated by a hand-crank from a distance; but I took that to be one of the last vestiges of the first section. Another gradual transition led into the final section, which consisted primarily of metallophones but with some lingering presence of the cymbals and gongs.

Those present for this occasion were not given any “instructions.” Indeed, the most ideal audience members were probably those who encountered this performance by accident, having planned merely to take a hike in the park. However, it was clear that the word had gotten out about this event, because I have never before seen Lands End as crowded as it was this afternoon. The good news was that, for the most part, this audience “got” that this was music to be experienced as physical sensations distributed over a large space, rather than sit-still-and-listen concert music. Many were there with their dogs; and even the dogs seemed to “get it” (except for those who got too close to a really loud cymbal crash).

On the other had there was a downside to this impressive turnout. The Conservancy has some very strict rules about where visitors to Lands End should and should not go. They believe that “good fences make good neighbors;” and any do-not-pass signals are easily recognized. Unfortunately, some of the percussionists were playing on the other side of a few of those fences. The result was that there were a fair number of listeners who felt that, if the performers go could there, they could too. My guess is that the Conservancy was not terribly happy about this state of affairs; but, for the most part, disruption was kept pretty minimal.

As to the act of listening, I came away with the strong sense that every listener was entitled to make whatever (s)he wished out of being in the presence of the performers. Personally, I found myself wandering from one “station” to another. At any particularly station, I would try to get at least a brief look at the score and then try to relate what I saw to what I was hearing. I would then pay more attention to how this “local listening” fit into the context of other stations that were audible but not necessarily visible. Having dealt with listening both in-the-small and in-the-large, I then moved on to another station and repeated the exercise. This kept me rather absorbed into the entire composition all the way into the transition to the metallophones. After checking out a few of the metallophone players (whose sounds did not tend to carry very far), I felt I had experienced enough, allowing the act of taking my leave to be situated in those sound-making processes that were still active. (For the record, when I was leaving I also saw one percussionist stowing his gear!)

Having then boarded the Geary bus, I felt a warm sense of satisfaction over having had the opportunity to experience “Inuksuit,” presumably in the sort of setting that Adams had intended for the composition.

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Celebrating John Luther Adams, a composer of land, air and water - SF Chronicle

http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/Celebrating-a-composer-of-land-air-and-water-11300053.php

Celebrating a composer of land, air and water

By Joshua Kosman

July 19, 2017 Updated: July 19, 2017 12:11pm

For decades, anyone searching for the composer John Luther Adams knew pretty much where to look. It might not have been easy to actually get to him, because beginning in the 1970s, Adams was mostly ensconced in a small wooden shed deep in the interior of Alaska.

But the steady flow of compositions coming out of that shed — innovative, grandly scaled works that were deeply imbued with a sense of place and attuned to the sounds and rhythms of the natural world — bore witness to his rooted existence in the Arctic Circle.

Now Adams, at 64, is on the move.

Three years ago — shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy for his vast, shimmery orchestral work “Become Ocean” — Adams and his wife, Cindy, pulled up stakes and relocated to New York City. When we spoke by phone recently, he was in Santiago, Chile, a location about which he speaks with a lover’s ardor.

And this week, Adams will be in San Francisco, where SFJazz is hosting a full-scale immersion in his work — a weeklong, six-event musical smorgasbord featuring percussion works, a sound installation at Grace Cathedral and a complete traversal of his string quartets, including a world premiere, presented by the virtuosic Jack Quartet.

Jazz, you say? Well, not by any traditional reckoning. Adams’ work sits more squarely within the experimental tradition of American classical music, nodding to such predecessors as John Cage, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell and Pauline Oliveros. Its vistas are expansive — often unfolding over an hour and more of gradual evolution — and its language is alternately lush and delicate.

Yet neither composer nor presenter is at all fazed by the seeming incongruity of this project.

“I love the fact that this is happening at what is, nominally at least, a non-classical venue,” Adams says. “And it strikes me more and more that listeners don’t care what music is called, or how it’s categorized — just how it speaks to them.

“So I hope they will come with a certain high curiosity, ready to hear something they haven’t heard before.”

Randall Kline, the founder and executive artistic director of SFJazz, sought Adams out on the basis of “Become Ocean,” which was premiered and recorded by the Seattle Symphony under its music director, Ludovic Morlot.

“I started listening to that piece, and I thought, there’s something about this that has an SFJazz aesthetic,” says Kline. “There’s that sense of openness, of not being confined. And a lot of it is about the experience of deep listening.”

In the interests of clarity, it’s worth pointing out — although this has become less necessary as his work has grown in prominence — that John Luther Adams uses his full name professionally for good reason. Of the two Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composers named John Adams, he is the younger one, and still arguably the less famous. He’s not the Berkeley composer of “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic,” although the two have known one another since the early 1970s.

“I remember in around 1980 that John and I both released recordings at the same time,” John Luther Adams recalls. “There was a review in Stereo Review under the headline ‘Two John Adamses.’ But it wasn’t long after that it came to seem like maybe there was just one John Adams, and pretty soon I knew I had a problem.”

Adopting his middle name for the first time since childhood was a difficult decision.

“I’d always hated my middle name — my mother only used it when she was mad at me — but one of my great heroes is Martin Luther King, and so I decided to just go with it. And over time I came to embrace it.”

For listeners unfamiliar with Adams’ work — its vivid blend of energy and stillness, its exquisite gradations of instrumental color, its gift for invoking spiritualism without sanctimony — the week’s festivities promise an immersive range of musical experiences. One of the highlights, surely, will be a performance of “Inuksuit,” Adams’ outdoor extravaganza for up to 99 percussionists splayed across a carefully chosen performance site — in this case, Sutro Baths at Lands End.

“This is a piece that has certain needs in order to mount an effective performance,” says Adams. “You need some reflective surfaces, you need some topography, and you need birds. There has to be a relationship with the acoustic environment.”

Yet despite its constraints, “Inuksuit,” completed in 2009, has emerged as one of Adams’ most frequently played works. In 2012, there was a ravishing performance on the UC Berkeley campus as part of Cal Performances’ presentation of music from the Ojai Festival. The piece has even been done indoors, in a 2011 performance at the New York Armory that garnered plenty of attention but left the composer feeling a little uneasy.

“That was the one and only authorized indoor performance,” Adams says. “The guest list was stellar. People had rapturous responses. It had sounds I’d never heard before. But it wasn’t ‘Inuksuit,’ because so much of that piece is a call-and-response with the music of the place it’s performed.”

Adams says friends have sometimes compared “Inuksuit” to Terry Riley’s 1964 minimalist classic “In C,” mostly because it’s the piece of his that gets performed most frequently. But it also shares with “In C” a celebration of a communal experience — an aspect of the work that Adams himself was slow to grasp.

“The piece relies on a community not just of musicians, but of its listeners and of the site itself. And this was the ultimate irony for a reclusive Alaskan composer. When I was working on it, I thought this was a piece about solitude. I imagined each performer and each listener as a solitary presence on this vast performance landscape. But then I discovered it was actually a community. The joke was on me.”

The string quartets on the schedule are a little more traditional, but only up to a point. They include two pieces in which the players never dampen a string against the fingerboard — both scores are entirely built out of open strings and natural harmonics. The new work, “Everything That Rises,” is constructed from a series of melodic and harmonic spirals that trend endlessly upward.

Also on the schedule are the percussion solo “Illimaq” (like many of Adams’ titles, this one derives from the indigenous languages of Alaska) and “Veils and Vesper,” a gradually evolving electro-acoustic soundscape to be installed in Grace Cathedral.

Born in Mississippi, Adams grew up in various locations around the U.S. His earliest musical experiences were as a rock ’n’ roll drummer, and an early passion for the music of Frank Zappa led him — as it did for many experimentally minded rockers — to the works of Edgard Varèse, Morton Feldman, Cage and Webern. Soon after graduating from Cal Arts in 1973, he moved to Alaska and found a home and an artistic motivation.

At first, though, he and his wife devoted themselves chiefly to environmental activism. They helped work toward the 1980 passage of a federal act, signed by President Jimmy Carter, to protect millions of acres of Alaskan land as parks and wildlife refuges.

Throughout the ensuing decades, much of Adams’ output — works bearing such wintry titles as “Dream in White on White” or “In a Treeless Place, Only Snow” — played to more urban listeners like bulletins from a remote outpost.

But more recently, a confluence of factors worked to dislodge the Adamses from their Arctic home. The political climate grew chillier and more polarized. Adams was beset by a series of eye problems that required one surgery after another. And the landscape itself had begun to shift.

“The undeniable and rapid advance of climate change was a big factor. Scientists have been predicting that changes would show up first in high latitudes, and boy, were they correct. We were right on the bleeding edge of it.”

So Adams and his wife decided that there was time for one more big adventure. They bought a small apartment in Manhattan, and moved there. It’s a decision about which he already sounds ambivalent at best.

“We love New York — to me it is still the city, and we’ve seen a few — but we have discovered, surprise surprise, that we’re not really city people. We love going there, and we love leaving. So it remains to be seen how New York will figure in our lives long term.”

At the moment, Adams is hip-deep in two large projects: a memoir of his life in Alaska, and a characteristically massive choral work scheduled for an outdoor premiere next summer in New York’s Central Park. It’s planned for some dozen choruses and, Adams hopes, upward of 1,000 voices.

“It does seem very Alaskan — very larger-than-life,” he acknowledges with a laugh. “Maybe it’s the masterpiece complex, which is absurd and outmoded, but for whatever reason, after living for virtually all of my creative life in a landscape like that, in that geography, I’ve come to measure everything that I do, and everything that humans do, against the natural world.

“You know, I went north all those years ago, as a romantic young crusader and artist, and I imagined that in Alaska I could step outside my own culture — which is patently ridiculous.

“But somehow I was able to draw music from the air and the earth, and that has served me well. Even though it’s obviously a ridiculous idea, it’s given me a life’s work.”

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@JoshuaKosman

John Luther Adams Festival: Wednesday-Sunday, July 26-30. $35. SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin St.; Sutro Baths, Lands End; Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., S.F. (866) 920-5299, www.sfjazz.org

Spotify playlist of music by John Luther Adams: http://tinyurl.com/y8gdgtsh

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John Luther Adams Interview with SF Classical Voice

https://www.sfcv.org/events-calendar/artist-spotlight/john-luther-adams-gets-a-festival-at-sfjazz

John Luther Adams Gets a Festival at SFJAZZ

BY JEFF KALISS,

July 17, 2017

In a feature preceding the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of John Luther Adams’s The Light That Fills the World a couple of years back, SFCV contributor Brett Campbell stated that, “No composer has been more successful at using sound and music not just to portray place in a sonic way, like a realist painter or photographer, but also to make listeners feel the emotion of being there.” Adams, who has spent the largest part of his career in Alaska and now has homes also in Mexico and New York City, will be here for a full week at the end of this month, for the John Luther Adams Festival. It’s hosted by SFJAZZ and will be presented at that organization’s Miner Auditorium, as well as at Grace Cathedral and at Land’s End, above the ocean in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

“I’m convinced that this is the biggest such series of events devoted exclusively to my music that’s ever happened,” says the 64-year-old Adams, who started in music as a rock ’n’ roll drummer and percussionist at age 12 and went on to study at the California Institute of the Arts, graduating in 1973. He came to Alaska as an environmental activist, then moved there and began to express in musical form his affection for nature and for the culture of Inuit and Athabascan native peoples.

Adams performed as timpanist and percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, as well as in a progressive jazz trio, before focusing completely on composition, counting Lou Harrison among his major musical mentors. In 2014 and 2015, he won a Pulitzer and a Grammy (Best Contemporary Classical Composition) for Become Ocean, recorded by the Seattle Symphony, but this month’s festival will showcase his non-orchestral writing, for soloists and ensembles of various sizes. Following is a distillation of SFCV’s long and far-ranging conversation with Adams, who was in Santiago, Chile.

What are you doing down there?

My wife Cynthia and I have been here for the last two months, holed up in the desert, working on a large — [chuckles] even for John Luther Adams, this is large — new piece, for Lincoln Center. It’s called In the Name of the Earth, and it will premiere outdoors, in Central Park, in August of 2018, with upwards of one thousand singers involved. I’ll be spending most of the next year working on it. I’ve recently been returning to the human voice. My latest CD is a concert-length work, Canticles for the Holy Winds, which I composed for a fabulous group, The Crossing, the new music choir based in Philadelphia, just released by Cantaloupe Music. Of course, “in the name,” or “in nomine,” is a conscious reference to Christian liturgy. But in the place of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I want to invoke the Earth, the Waters, and the Holy Winds.

I’d like to know about your own religious background. I also want you to tell us about the Native American and Inuit elements that inspire your music and the titles of some of your pieces, including two that we’ll hear in this festival. My older brother, Tony, taught in an Alaskan community college for many years, and over time his left-wing ideology seemed to have been informed by native spirituality.

That’s a great question, and not the usual. I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and sang in the church choir, but I’ve never been a practicing Christian. My politics have always been way to the left, but I’ve never been red, I’ve always been green. My path is similar to your brother’s, in that I feel a deep resonance with what I understand of native lifeways and belief systems, from spending most of my life in Alaska. I’ve learned from the people there that everything is sacred and everything is quotidian, and we need to float back and forth between those two modes of being present in the world.

You’ve tried to help make that happen.

Absolutely, whether it’s taking music out of the concert hall and into the big world, or in my own experience. Like with a piece like Ilimaq [the Inuit term for a spiritual journey], for solo drummer and electronics, that’s being performing on the last night of the festival [at the Miner Auditorium, on July 30]. It’s inspired by Inuit traditions of the shaman’s drum. Yes, it’s a musical instrument, but it’s also a vehicle for traveling between this world and the spirit world, which is present with us all the time.

Will the solo drummer, Doug Perkins, be acquainted with these traditions?

Doug’s one of the foremost proponents of my music. He’s been the ringmaster of more performances of Inuksuit [from the Inuit term for a landmark, the free admission Land’s End performance takes place on July 29] than anyone else on the planet. But hopefully the music conveys all of that on its own terms. Because, frankly, if it doesn’t, then all the blather, all the verbiage, ultimately mean nothing.

Let me return to what you’ve been doing in Chile, and how that might give us insight into your process.

Each work involves different tools and processes. I use whatever tool is important, including computers: notation software, audio software. But in recent years, for a variety of reasons, I’ve made a concerted effort to return as much as possible to pencil and paper, and I’m very particular: I use a pencil that is no longer made, friends have been buying them up, whenever they can, at exorbitant prices, and I use custom-made 11-inch by 17-inch manuscript paper in landscape format. But even before I get to pencil and paper, I try to hold a piece in my mind’s ear as long as I possibly can. It enforces a kind of discipline on my imagination, and keeps me from just manipulating things.

In your recorded pieces, I’m finding colors and tones. I wonder if you’re inherently synesthetic.

You know, Jeff, I think we all are. I don’t have that kind of Messiaen or Scriabin synesthesia, but my friend David Abram, the philosopher, says that our senses want to be whole, in the presence of any strong stimulation or excitement. There’s a kind of vacuum, in our bodies, in our minds, in our spirits, perhaps, that needs to be filled. That’s the way in which I’m synesthetic.

Maybe you can get us there better than when we’re stuck in a concert hall chair riding yet another symphonic warhorse.

I hope it’s not a heavy-handed mission, but it’s something I want for myself. Our lives, our culture, our world, the human world, has become dangerously, potentially fatally fragmented, and we’ve got to put things back together. And we damn well better do it in a hurry, because Antarctica is coming apart now. I hope it can happen in a gorgeous space like the SFJAZZ Center, it’s a more promising environment in which to experience this. But it’s also part of the reason why I’ve moved outside, so that in experiencing Inuksuit at Land’s End, people from San Francisco, or from the other side of the Bay, may experience a place they know well in a new way. And I’m thrilled about installing [the electronic soundscape] Veils and Vesper, one of my favorite pieces, in Grace Cathedral [on July 29], where you might see colors you haven’t seen before, or not in a while.

How did this festival come to be?

Randall Kline, the godfather of SFJAZZ, is a force of nature, and he approached me; he was politely persistent. It would be fine in a classical music venue, but I particularly like that it’s happening outside the classical music ghetto, if you will. Because this is where the audience for this new music is, particularly with younger people who don’t care whether something is classified as classical or jazz or anything else. All these listeners care about is haring something that moves them, something that touches them, maybe something they haven’t heard before. [Kline and Adams will host a Listening Party at the Miner Auditorium, to open the festival on July 26.]

Will you be functioning anything like a conductor?

No. I used to perform my own music regularly, I had a series of ensembles, but it’s not my job. I’ll come to San Francisco a couple of days early, visit all the sites, and begin to fine-tune how we’ll present each of the pieces in each of the spaces. Then I’ll be in rehearsals with the JACK Quartet, and Doug Perkins, and with the ensemble for Inuksuit. Once I act as a sort of landscape architect for designing the overall shape of the performances, I’ll be working with the audio technicians as a sort of sound designer. My music is all about sound and also all about space, not just musical, poetic, or metaphorical space, but physical, acoustic, volumetric space.

It looks like Inuksuit will involve the largest ensemble, if not also the biggest audience.

It can be performed with anywhere from 9 to 99 musicians, in multiples of three, because there are three different families of instruments — metal, drums, and air, in a way corresponding to earth, water, and wind — and you have to have an equal number. I know Doug started recruiting some time ago, and I think we’re shooting for somewhere around 66. But it’s not a loosey-goosey hippy-dippy happening, it’s a serious musical composition and performance. Though it is open-ended in its form, and flexible in its scale.

What about the role of the listeners/audience? Will they be free to wander around the Sutro Baths?

I try to leave it completely undetermined. What I want for you is what I want for myself, which is an invitation to enter into a place, into a world that may be ravishingly beautiful, may be a little bit scary, some combination of the two, and to have the freedom to take your own journey. Find a spot and root yourself, or move the whole time and just follow your ears. I’m hoping to give you the opportunity to experience more fully your own presence, your own place in the world. And if it’s not putting too grandiose a point on it, I’d say that’s a kind of model of how I imagine human society might be. If we lived in a society in which we all felt more deeply embedded and responsible and empowered, I think problems like global warming and income inequality and injustice would be dealt with more immediately.

Which should also involve deep listening, to each other.

Which is a very, very hard thing to do.

Will your pieces make special demands on the Miner Auditorium?

I think so, including lighting demands. Take the world premiere of the new string quartet,Everything That Rises [July 28]. It’s really four simultaneous solos, and the musicians [the JACK Quartet] will be deployed around the house, around the audience, in four different directions on four different levels. The same will be true for Ilimaq, the big percussion work with electronics. We’ll do that as surround sound.

How has it been to have a chamber ensemble like JACK in your stable?

A number of my large ensemble works included a string quartet, but I’d never imagined I’d write a string quartet [per se]. Then, while I was teaching at Harvard for a semester, I heard the JACK Quartet, and I instantly understood how I might make the medium my own. The result was The Wind in High Places [composed in 2011, to be performed by the JACK on July 27], which is a 20-minute piece composed in natural harmonics on open strings. A couple of years later, a second quartet followed, Untouched [also on the July 27 program], a further exploration of that Aeolian sound world. That was written for Brooklyn Rider with JACK in mind, and JACK is recording it this weekend. The third quartet was Canticles of the Sky, and they finally got to touch the fingerboards. Now comesEverything That Rises, where they play stopped tones, but it’s also in [just intonation] tuning. It’s the harmonic series superimposed on itself, going up the spiral, and as you get higher and higher, the intervals get smaller and smaller, so they get more dissonant; but of course they’re acoustically perfect dissonances, so they don’t have that edgy growl. The JACK is recording it this weekend in Banff, but San Francisco is getting the premiere performance.

I assume that after the prep work, you’ll be free to be out there among the rest of us listeners?

I’m excited about meeting the listeners, particularly those who may be regulars at SFJAZZ but maybe haven’t heard that much of this kind of music, whatever we call it now.

After the spacious inspirations of Alaska and Mexico, have you found inspirational soundscapes in New York?

I’m not a city boy. Cynthia and I have a lovely little one-bedroom apartment in the liveliest corner of what the real estate developers are trying to call SOHA, which is South Harlem. There’s a certain kind of work I can do in New York, but I can’t do the deep, slow, foundation work, so we’ve been spending as much time as we can in undisclosed remote locations, so I can get some serious work done. But last year I did a little piece that is my one and only New York City piece. It was a commission from the Metropolitan Museum, which took over the old Whitney Museum building when the Whitney moved downtown. They asked me to make a little sound log, composed from recordings that were “crowd-sourced” in the streets between the two buildings. It’s called Soundwalk 9:09.

And the Beatles version which preceded it, “One After 909."

“Move over once, move over twice.”

I see you’ve held on to your rock cred. What’s in the offing, aside from that Central Park piece?

Next March, in Seattle, Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony will give the world premiere performance of Become Desert, which completes the trilogy that began withBecome River and Become Ocean. This will be a huge piece, the same length as Become Ocean but with five separate ensembles, including choir. And they’re bringing it to Cal Performances in April.

Will Cynthia be here with you for your festival? Does she have a part in your creations, aside from as wife and mother?

I wouldn’t go anywhere without her, and oh my goodness, she does indeed! She is very much my muse, my foil, my best friend, my compatriot from the environmental crusade; we have shared so much in our lives together. And fortunately, she’s not in music at all. [Cynthia Adams is the founder and CEO of GrantStation, which helps nonprofits secure funding. The Adams’s son, Sage, is GrantStation’s lead programmer.] Cynthia is completely adventurous and irreverent. She’s become a kind of collaborator, not in an obvious way but that we’re having these experiences in wild country, sharing our solitude. She’s a fantastic observer, because she is smart, and incredibly patient. She brings to being present in a place that quality of intense attention that I want to bring to my work as composer, and that I hope to inspire for you, as a listener to the music.

Jeff Kaliss has written about opera and other classical forms for the MarinIndependent-Journal and The Oakland Tribune. He is based in San Francisco, and also covers jazz, world music, country, rock, film, theater, and other entertainment. The second edition of his authorized biography of Sly & the Family Stone was published by Backbeat Books.

[sfjazz]

T Sisters are doin’ it for themselves - SF Chronicle

http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/T-Sisters-are-doin-it-for-themselves-11278440.php

Music

T Sisters are doin’ it for themselves

By Joshua Zucker July 10, 2017 Updated: July 10, 2017 2:59pm

The family band, a construct as old as music itself, is a complex and dynamic organism. Bonds of blood can produce unparalleled musical chemistry and connection, but also carry the baggage of a lifetime of mutual experience.

The T Sisters are an Oakland, mostly acoustic, Americana sextet built around the vocal harmonies of sisters Erika, Rachel and Chloe Tietjen. With one foot steeped in old-time bluegrass tradition and the other stepping forward, blazing their own stylistic path, the sisters headline the Great Americas Songbook series at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium on Friday, July 14.

To describe them as a singing family string band would be accurate, but too narrow. The awareness of and connection to that lineage is direct and apparent both in the harmony singing and the spare acoustic instrumentation, but their music also is strongly shaped by theater and contemporary influences.

The sisters cite their singer-songwriter father, Ramsey Tietjen, as a primary musical influence during their growing-up years in Berkeley. Both parents cultivated a creatively nurturing environment where all three children thrived artistically from their earliest memories of staging original plays in their grandparents’ living room.

The performance bug bit Erika first.

“There is a musical theater camp, Young People's Theater Group, for Berkeley students fourth grade and up that I got to go to first, being a grade ahead of my sisters,” Erika recalls (Erika is 20 months older than twins Rachel and Chloe). “It was a diverse and collaborative program where the director and the older students would write an original musical using tunes from other shows and even contemporary stuff — kind of a mishmash of styles and genres and time periods.”

While influences from the country-folk idiom such as the classic trio work by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris are evident, the seeds of their own harmony singing grew out of a steady childhood diet of pop groups like the Beach Boys; Crosby, Still and Nash; and the Beatles.

After college, the sisters regrouped to collaborate on a musical theater piece as part of Rachel’s senior thesis, which grew into a residency in San Francisco. From there they spent a few years honing their skills and working open mikes while beginning to garner local acclaim. They quit their day jobs in early 2014 and have released two full-length albums and an EP, with another on the way.

“About a year before that, we all got together and talked about what it would be like to do this thing full time. We wanted to be more deliberate about it and see what would happen if we went for it. It was like we had to get out of the way of the path that had chosen us,” says Chloe.

All three siblings contribute original material. Asked about their writing process, Erika explains, “We all have different musical influences, so the style of song that each of us writes is different and distinct. We’ve found that writing separately maintains something of an eclectic feel to our sets, but we spend a lot of time together working the harmonies and counter-melodies — so the songs are united by the T Sisters sound and style of arranging.”

The sisters have established a loyal following in the Bay Area and along the West Coast, and are aggressively expanding their audience on the East Coast, where they just completed their third of four runs over an eight-month span. Erika, speaking by phone from Vermont, acknowledges that the music business at any level is a challenging uphill battle.

“We’re lucky to be able to make it work in the Bay Area as many artists are having to leave the area.”

The sisters reside in a live-work warehouse in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.

“We have a good amount of physical space to rehearse and sometimes perform and build — we have a wood shop and costume room. We have the physical trappings that you need for being an artist who works at home,” Erika says.

Asked whether they were affected by the 2016 Ghost Ship fire that deeply shook Oakland’s artistic community, Chloe reflects, “Emotionally it hit home, living in an warehouse space and knowing what it’s like to deal with rents in the Bay Area while trying to live in a creative space and do things a bit differently, so it feels very close to home in that way — and it was very close to home, only about a half a mile from our house.”

And how does one survive in the Bay Area economy as an independent artist?

“We try to be as flexible an operation as possible,” Rachel explains. “Our multiplicity of experiences allows us to play SFJazz one night and play as part of the hippie parade for the Berkeley Art Museum the next day and the opening of Finnish Airlines at SFO the next. Any possible thing. We do workshops — teaching kids about singing harmony. We feel strongly about empowering young women to participate in music, play instruments and sing. Everything we can get our hands on we try to get into.”

And as for working so closely with one’s siblings, it’s a matter of mutual respect and communication, for better and for worse.

“We know each other, love each other, understand and respect each other in a profound way,” Erika says. “We're deeply on the same page, even when we're not.”

Joshua Zucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jzucker@sfchronicle.com

T Sisters: 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 14. $25-$50. SFJazz, Miner Auditorium, 201 Franklin St., S.F. (866) 920-5299. www.sfjazz.org/events/sessions/2017/0714/t-sisters.

[sfjazz]

Chris Potter Quartet/ Melissa Aldana Group Review - All About Jazz

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/chris-potter-quartet-melissa-aldana-group-chris-potter-by-harry-s-pariser.php

Chris Potter Quartet/ Melissa Aldana Group

SFJAZZ

San Francisco, CA

June 13, 2017

It is rare that two saxophonists share a bill with their quartets. It's even less common when one of the two is female. The two were Chris Potter and Melissa Aldana, and they shared the stage at SFJAZZ in San Francisco's Hayes Valley.

Aldana seemingly came out of nowhere to win the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition in 2013, the first female instrumentalist to grab the prize. However, she is no stranger to jazz, having headlined since the tender age of 16. It is said that the fruit does not fall far from the tree, so it should come as no surprise that the Chilean native's father, Marcos Aldana, is also a talented saxophonist. And, like his daughter, he competed in the Monk competition in 1991, a year in which Joshua Redman came in first and Chris Potter third.

Potter, who was born in Chicago but grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, was inspired to play after listening to Paul Desmond. After mastering Charlie Parker's complex fingering, he made his stage debut on alto saxophone at the age of 13. He first gained street cred in New York City when he performed with Red Rodney. Over the decades, he has produced 19 CDs by his lonesome and innumerable others as a sideman (most notably, ten with Dave Holland and nine with Paul Motian). A long list of awards, as well as accolades from musicians such as Kenny Wheeler and Joe Lovano, attest to his mastery of the instrument. Aldana herself had this to say about him to Jazztimes: "Chris just does some ridiculous things on the saxophone that I don't hear anybody else doing."

First, it was Aldana's turn to show her stuff. Donned in a blue dress and black sandals, she brought her tenor to the stage and was joined by trumpeter Philip Dizack to introduce her tune "Elsewhere." "Perdon," by accomplished bassist (and fellow Chilean) Pablo Menares followed. Aldana soloed impressively throughout.

About halfway into her hour-long set, drummer Craig Weinrib launched into an extended drum solo, with an impressive workout on the sticks, as the other three looked on. Aldana's "Turning" was followed by a standing ovation.

Following an intermission, Potter, wearing a light-blue shirt and dark trousers, arrived on the stage; set a synthesizer on a stool, programmed it; and launched into the fiery "Yasodhara," a composition apparently named after the wife of the Buddha. Sporting an Afro, the Cuban-born David Virelles, a highly accomplished pianist, added to the percussive mix, as did drummer Dan Weiss, who demonstrated his versatility with both brushes and sticks. Potter played his tenor adroitly, adjusted his synthesizer and stepped back to let others solo.

At the beginning of "Sonic Anomaly," Potter told the audience "I'm very fortunate to be sharing a stage with these cats." The following two tunes—"The Dreamer Is The Dream" and "Ilimba"—clearly demonstrated why.

A standing ovation brought the ensemble back for the propulsive "Strike."

[sfjazz]

Ambrose Akinmusire Review - All About Jazz

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/ambrose-akinmusire-at-sfjazz-by-harry-s-pariser.php

Ambrose Akinmusire

SFJAZZ 

San Francisco, California

June 15, 2017

For trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, the band is everything: "When I'm playing with other people, it's hard to produce, because I don't have that relationship. But when I play with my band, it's endless," he told the New York Times in March 2011.

Akinmusire has been playing with drummer Justin Brown since they were 14 or 15 years old; they grew up together in a rough-and-tumble part of Oakland, California. "There's a long history of trumpet and drums together, so it's been great to grow up and develop with a drummer as fantastic as him," Akinmusire enthused. Akinmusire has known pianist Sam Harris and bassist Harish Raghavan, a north Illinois native, since the mid 2000s. "Sam and I went to Manhattan School of Music together. Every time I heard him he would sound completely different... He's so curious and he's always studying. Harish and I met when I was at the Thelonious Monk Institute. He's the instigator of the band.... he's improvising and thinking about melody and many times coming out of his register."

As they form a cohesive unit, it is not surprising that Akinmusire called the band at the start of his two sets at SFJAZZ or that he did so several times during each set. Years of musical camaraderie were quite evident in terms of the unit's cohesion. Stepping onto the stage, the black-clad Akinmusire offered both subtle and fast-and-furious trumpeting, complimented by Harris' sweeping piano and the dreadlocked Brown's intrepid, take-no-prisoners drumming. From the first, Raghavan proved to be a force of nature on the bass. A round of cymbals marked the end of the first piece, while an elaborate piano solo from Harris began the second. Things then slowed down as Akinmusire, complimented by some extended cymbal work, blew some extended tones to commence "A Moment In Between the Rest (to curve an ache)." Then the ensemble charged in.

So it went for the remainder of the evening. Subtle interludes metamorphosed into extended, hard-charging, frenzied excursions. Brown showed eloquence with his bristles and his mettle on the sticks. Harris, played with sleeves rolled up, his hands cascading up and down the keys, executing several solos.

Akinmusire imagines "A Song to exhale To [Diver Song]" as the "soundtrack" to "a diver with scuba equipment going down really slowly." Raghavan played a lovely bowed intro on the bass as we began our descent to the depths. A frantically fingered bass solo, executed by carefully reading the notes from the page on the black stand in front of him, enlivened "The Condor," a composition from A Rift In Decorum: Live At The Village Vanguard (Blue Note, 2017).

Frantic or subtle, all the Akinmusire compositions had one thing in common: they developed and progressed as opposed to repeating. The tone of his playing changed like the weather, as did the timbre of his versatile band. All this bodes well for the future of this talented trumpet player and his talented associates.

[sfjazz]

Team-Ups & Supergroups Power San Francisco Jazz Festival - DownBeat

http://downbeat.com/news/detail/team-ups-supergroups-power-san-francisco-jazz-festival

Team-Ups & Supergroups Power San Francisco Jazz Festival

LIVE, MELISSA ALDANA, CHRIS POTTER, LIZZ WRIGHT, JACK DEJOHNETTE, JOHN SCOFIELD, MARQUIS HILL

By Yoshi Kato   I  Jun 16, 2017   10:57 AM

Before the SFJAZZ Center opened in January 2013, SFJAZZ’s flagship programming was its San Francisco Jazz Festival (SFJF), which took place every fall. The SFJF was moved to June after SFJAZZ switched to a more academic schedule, presenting a season’s worth of concerts from September through May.

The 2017 version of the SFJF runs for 12 days and began on June 6, with three concerts within a two-block radius. Burt Bacharach gave a rescheduled performance at the rented Davies Symphony Hall while the dazzling multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier was headlining in-house at the Center’s Robert M. Miner Auditorium

Trumpeter Marquis Hill was also leading his stellar Blacktet at the Center’s Joe Henderson Lounge. By the time Monday morning rolled around, there were shows by 15 artists ranging from the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and composer/pianist Amina Figarova to Herb Alpert & Lani Hall and ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro.

For drummer Jack DeJohnette, double bassist Larry Grenadier, keyboardist John Medeski and guitarist John Scofield, there was twice the cause for celebration on June 8: It was the first time that they’d played together since recording Hudson, their debut recording. And it was being released the following day on the Motéma label.

All four musicians live in New York’s Hudson Valley, with three of them already having histories together. DeJohnette and Scofield toured and recorded with organist Larry Goldings as Trio Beyond, while Scofield has done the same with Medeski, Martin & Wood.

Surrounded on three sides by keyboards—a Hammond B-3, a Fender Rhodes and a grand piano—Medeski was stage right with DeJohnette situated diagonally across. Intriguingly, all but Grenadier had vocal microphones.

Holding court at Miner Auditorium, Scofield played an unaccompanied introduction to Jimi Hendrix’s “Wait Until Tomorrow” before Medeski, Grenadier and DeJohnette joined in. As he did throughout the night, Medeski was multi-tasking—his right hand playing organ and left hand laying down chords on the heavily effects-processed Rhodes.

Those mic stands came into play a few songs later, as DeJohnette sang on another Hendrix number, “Castles Made Of Sand.” He sings lead on only one of Hudson’s tracks (“Dirty Ground, which he co-wrote with pianist and fellow trio-mate Bruce Hornsby), so it was nice to hear his half-spoken crooning on a couple of other numbers, with Scofield occasionally adding background vocals. (It was also a treat to hear the rare pairing of organ and double bass.)

Scofield and DeJohnette explained that the inspiration for the repertoire was the Hudson Valley and the music of the 1960s. The encore of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” was the perfect combination of both. And the fact that David Crosby had been on that very same stage several months earlier with Snarky Puppy further tied the sentiment back to the SFJAZZ Center.

Vocalist Lizz Wright was the only act to have two separate shows in Miner Auditorium this SFJF with a Friday night date preceding a rare Saturday mid-afternoon matinee. Opening with a series of songs in tribute to Ella Fitzgerald’s centenary, she and pianist Kenny Banks honored not only the First Lady of Song’s 100th birthday but also her ever-present dignity and resolve.

A medley that included “What Is This Thing Called Love” and “Love You Madly” wholly showcased Wright’s vocal pathos and range. “The Nearness Of You” concluded the mini-set before guitarist Chris Rosser, bass guitarist Dan Lutz and drummer Ivan Edwards emerged for “Seems I’m Never Tired Lovin’ You.”

The daytime was throwing her off, she said, so she wore a bright yellow outfit. (She noted that the color was also relatable to fans of both the Golden State Warriors andCleveland Cavaliers, who recently tussled in the NBA Finals.) Noting that she would likely get locked in the building if she didn’t perform the next song, she dove into her trademark simmering version of “Old Man” by singer-songwriter Neil Young, a former Bay Area resident.

Davis often played both piano and the adjacent organ to great effect—as he did on “New Game,” a song not originally on the setlist, Wright revealed. She called that audible, she said, in honor of Game 5 of the NBA Finals, which would be held across the Bay in Oakland two nights later. While her set started intimately, it crescendoed to rousing songs such as the Toshi Reagon-penned “Freedom” and the gospel standard “Walk With Me, Lord.”

Following its extended opening weekend, the 2017 SFJF still had 13 acts go over 22 more shows. Chris Potter was part of the SFJAZZ ECM Fest in 2015 and partook in another thematic program, a de facto “two tenors” pairing with Melissa Aldana.

Having recorded and toured with her Crash Trio in recent years, Aldana is now leading a quintet. Her band on June 13 featured trumpeter Philip Dizack, pianist Glenn Zaleski, Crash Trio double bassist Pablo Menares and drummer Craig Weinrib.

After performing numbers by the bandleader and Menares, the quintet became a quartet as Dizack left the bandstand. Aldana plunged into an extended a cappella introduction that hinted at “St. Thomas” before settling into a crystalline interpretation of “Spring Can Hang You Up The Most.” A return to original work by Aldana and the quintet closed the first half of the program.

Potter chose four selections from his latest project, The Dreamer Is The Dream, which was released by ECM in late April. Pianist David Virelles, who appeared on the album, was part of a group that included double bassist Ben Street and drummer Dan Weiss.

“Yasodhara” and “Sonic Anomaly,” two Potter originals from the new album, were performed back to back like an intense, extended two-movement work. The saxophonist took a brief break to introduce the band and back-announce the titles before switching to soprano for “Heart In Hand,” another new original. Before the group finished, Weiss gave a mesmerizing master class of a solo in which he seamlessly explored each part of his seven-piece drum kit. DB

[sfjazz]

Burt Bacharach Photos & Review - The Bay Bridged

http://thebaybridged.com/2017/06/13/photos-review-burt-bacharach-quips-wonder-still/

Photos + Review: Burt Bacharach quips, “You wonder why I am still doing this.”

By Carla Bova|June 13, 2017

With the first piano key he struck, legendary composer Burt Bacharach brought his San Francisco audience to a sweeter time through his musical message – what the world needs now is love.

He played a resounding retrospective showcasing his boundless catalog of classics from a golden era of music that he revolutionized.

Right up to the last chord, Bacharach had the crowd swaying, singing, and smiling as attendees recognized hit after hit from his parade of songs that never went out of style. He made sure everyone left smiling by inviting all to join an irresistible singalong to his beloved “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.”

“Let’s sing one song together,” Bacharach said. “The audience and me and the band.”

Considered one of the most renowned and accomplished living composers, Bacharach’s career spans six decades that are marked by 66 US Top 40 hits, six No. 1 songs, eight Grammy awards, and three Academy Awards.

Bacharach’s impact on music history is undeniable. A pioneer of creative standards, his compositions are credited as helping define popular music dating back to the late 1950’s. He claims hits in a breadth of styles, from rock and soul to Broadway shows and Hollywood films. He has influenced artists across genres, with his works recorded by hundreds of singers from Perry Como and Gene Pitney to Barbra Streisand and Diana Krall. Over the years, he maintained global appeal to generations of fans.

The 89-year-old songwriter, conductor, arranger, producer frequently broke from playing the piano during his June 7 show at Davies Symphony Hall, and stood center stage in front of his grand instrument. He leaned casually against it while chatting with the audience.

“I love this hall,” he said. “It is one of the greatest halls I’ve ever played in so I am glad to be back.”

Between songs, he spoke of memories including his mother’s influence, getting a divorce in Las Vegas, appearing on the Tonight Show with James Brown, and touring with actress/singer Marlene Dietrich. He was her music director from 1958 to 1961. Prior to that he worked as piano accompanist for many singers includingPaula Stewart. They were married from 1953 to 1958.

“I guess you guys wonder why I am still doing this,” Bacharach said. “I don’t play golf. ...What grounds me is to make music, to continue to write music, to continue to play music, and to continue to perform for people like you. If I could make you feel a bit better, lift a bit of the heaviness off you, then I feel very happy.”

Bacharach performed with a seven-member band and three singers. Still, he played piano the entire show, sang some of his own hits, and through sharp conducting displayed how he earned his reputation as a perfectionist.

At the end of every piece, he stood from his piano bench. He spoke or sang the last few words of each song, guiding the singers to end on the note he wanted, at the tempo he wanted. With a flick of his hand, he likewise guided the musicians to end on point.

Bacharach is considered a visionary whose music is often described as having unconventional time signatures, unusual chord progressions, atypical instruments, catchy melodies, and combinations of jazz, pop, Brazilian.

He told the crowd he loved jazz and sited his major influences as bebop legendsCharlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. “Dizzy Gillespie was my hero,” he said.

By some accounts, Bacharach wrote about 500 compositions. His charting songs are too many to name and too many to play in a two-hour show. He tried though, by including two jam-packed medleys. “We are going to do a lot of music for you,” he said. “Some old, some not so old.”

The first medley was a group of hit songs and a nod to two of Bacharach’s longtime collaborators.

“Many of these songs have lyrics written by the brilliant Hal David,” he said. Bacharach and David met when both worked at New York’s famed Brill Building, known as the site where some of the greatest American songs were crafted. The two men first collaborated in 1957, writing "The Story of My Life" which was recorded by Marty Robbins.

“This is the very first record we did with Dionne Warwick,” he said, to start off the medley. The band then played “Don’t Make Me Over.” The song reached No. 21 in 1962. It was the first of 20 Top 40 hits that Bacharach and David would write and produce for Warwick over the next 10 years.

The medley continued with “Walk On By,” “This Guy’s In Love With You,” “I Say A Little Prayer,” “Trains and Boats and Planes,” “Do You Know the Way To San Jose,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” and “(There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me.”

The latter was sung masterfully by John Pagano and accompanied by big horns. This Bacharach/David song was recorded by three different artists in the ‘60s alone and was made popular again in 1983 by the British synth pop band Naked Eyes with a cover version that reached No. 8.

The second medley featured a slew of hits and award-winning songs that Bacharach wrote for movies. He reportedly began scoring films after meeting his second wife, actress Angie Dickinson. They were married from 1965 to 1980.

“Motion pictures, film, cinema has been good fortune for me. Here’s some of the music I’ve done for them,” he said.

He returned to his piano and sang “The Look of Love” which he wrote for the soundtrack of the 1967 film Casino Royale. It was originally performed by Dusty Springfield.

The medley continued with snippets of “The April Fools,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “Making Love” (a hit for Roberta Flack in 1982), “Wives and Lovers” (a hit for Jack Jones in 1963), and “Alfie” which won a Grammy award for Best Instrumental Arrangement in 1967.

There was only time for a verse or two, but people jumped to their feet for “What’s New Pussycat?,” the No. 3 title track hit for Tom Jones in 1965. Then came a small taste of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” written for the 1969 filmButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The No. 1 hit and film score earned Bacharach two Oscars and a Grammy award.

The audience grew sentimental as Bacharach played “Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do)” from the 1981 film Arthur, which he also scored. Sung byChristopher Cross, the song was yet another No. 1 hit and won an Oscar for Best Song.

“Arthur’s Theme” is also notable as the start of Bacharach’s relationship with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, who became his third wife from 1982 to 1991. The pair collaborated on many hits played that evening including “That’s What Friends Are For,” the 1985 No.1 Grammy-winning hit sung by Dionne Warwick and Friends, and the 1986 No. 1 R&B duet “On My Own” sung by Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald.

“Some I like better. Some I like less, but they are mine,” Bacharach said of his songs.

Other highlights of the show included singer Josie James’ rendition of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (originally sung by Warwick in 1963) which Bacharach called spectacular. And singer Donna Taylor’s striking version of “(They Long To Be) Close To You” with sparse accompaniment by Bacharach on the piano. The Carpenters’ version of this track hit No. 1 in 1970. Also notable, Pagano’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” which earned a hug from the composer.

“This is a very, very old song I wrote years ago with Bob Hilliard, ‘Mexican Divorce,’” Bacharach said, when introducing the 1961 track. “It was recorded bythe Drifters.”

“There were three ways to get a divorce that I knew of. The standard way was to go to court with expensive lawyers. Another way was to go to Las Vegas and establish residency for six weeks. That’s how I got my first divorce. Then there was a Mexican divorce. It was long before anyone had an idea to build a … wall.”

He continued, “We thought it was going to be a hit but we lost the South. They didn’t want to play anything that had divorce in it.”

Oliver Bacharach came out to play keyboard on a few songs including “Make It Easy On Yourself.” Bacharach praised his son as a gifted keyboardist who took to the instrument naturally.

“I got a push from my mother and look where it got me,” Bacharach said. He recalled that his mother forced him to take piano lessons. Though he fiercely hated the lessons, he continued playing. “I did not want to disappoint my mother.”

Bacharach married his fourth wife Jane Hansen in 1993. He has seen countless tributes, accolades, and compilations, as well as a resurgence throughout the '90s and beyond. Some noteworthy examples include a 1996 appearance with Noel Gallagher of Oasis; cameo appearances in three Austin Powers movies; several appearances on American Idol; and a 1998 collaboration with Elvis Costello on the Grammy-winning single “I Still Have That Other Girl.” In 2005 he released the Grammy-winning album At This Time, which had contributions by Dr. Dre, Chris Botti, Rufus Wainwright, and Costello and was the first record to feature lyrics written by Bacharach.

The San Francisco show started to wrap up with “Any Day Now,” then the encore “That’s What Friends Are For.” Bacharach asked the audience to join him in singing “Rain Drops Keep Fallin' On My Head.” As the song played, he blew a kiss, signed a fan’s album, fist bumped his three singers, hugged his son, and waved goodnight. He walked off as the memorable melody concluded. Another precise ending, conducted Bacharach style.

[sfjazz]

SFJAZZ Collective Miles Davis CD review - All About Jazz

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/live-sfjazz-center-2016-music-of-miles-davis-and-original-compositions-review-by-john-kelman.php

By JOHN KELMAN

June 13, 2017

710 Views

In the thirteen years since the SFJAZZ Collective first came together in February 2004, this revolving door octet of "cream of the crop" US-based jazz musicians has, most years, followed a consistent modus operandi: select a well-known jazz (and, in two cases, beyond jazz) musician and pay tribute through innovative arrangements of his/her music, alongside a set of new original compositions—in almost every case, one each contributed by every member of the Collective.

In the ensuing years since its 2004 debut, which set an initial high bar by paying tribute to free jazz progenitor Ornette Coleman, the Collective has delivered additional homages to everyone from John Coltrane,Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner toHorace Silver, Chick Corea, Joe Henderson, Stevie Wonder andMichael Jackson.

While there are more than enough artists to keep the Collective going in perpetuity, the above list of largely iconic jazz artists is missing one obvious entry: Miles Davis. It's curious, in fact, that it took the Collective so long to get to the late trumpeter, bandleader and stylistic redefiner; but perhaps it's the particularly broad scope of Davis' career that led to the Collective holding off until it could figure out how to best cover the farthest reaches of a musician who moved effortlessly—and in just four decades, from the 1950s through early '90s—from bebop to cool jazz, from modal jazz to free bop, and from the densely electrified fusion of the 1970s through a more eminently accessible and star power-driven final chapter of pop-informed jazz.

Thirteen years may have been a long time to wait for an SFJAZZ Collective tour and album dedicated to the music of Davis, along with a host of new original compositions from the current octet, but with Live: SFJAZZ Center 2016—Music of Miles Davis & Original Compositions, it's clearly been worth the wait.

A two-disc set, with one dedicated to the Davis arrangements and the other featuring the original compositions, Music of Miles Davis manages to cover considerable Davis territory with a compelling and creative blend of reverence and reinvention. Bassist Matt Penman contributes a reshuffled look at the title track to Milestones (Columbia, 1958), while trumpeter Sean Jones creates a semi-faithful reconstruction of "So What" and pianist Edward Simon metrically rejigs "All Blues," both from Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Alto saxophonistMiguel Zenon refracts "Nardis"—a composition written, but never actually performed, by Davis for then-Davis sextet altoistJulian "Cannonball" Adderley's Portrait of Cannonball (Riverside, 1958)—through a folkloric and Eastern European-tinged prism, while vibraphonistWarren Wolf contributes a hard-swinging "Joshua," first heard on the transitional Seven Steps to Heaven (Columbia, 1963), and tenor saxophonistDavid Sanchez presents a more outré yet still rhythmically propulsive look at "Teo," from Someday My Prince Will Come (Columbia, 1961). And, representing Davis' electric years, drummer Obed Calvaire deconstructs the title track to Davis' seminal fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970), resulting in an even more open-ended take, while trombonistRobin Eubanks builds a fragment-driven and groove- heavy deconstruction of the title track to 1986's Tutu (Davis' Warner Brothers debut and first deep collaboration with bassist Marcus Miller).

This is the Collective's longest-lasting lineup—with the exception of Jones replacing Avishai Cohen, this incarnation has remained consistent since 2015'sLive: SFJAZZ Center 2014 -The Music of Joe Henderson & Original Compositions (SFJAZZ, 2015). And, while only Zenón remains from the Collective's 2004 incarnation—but with trombonist Robin Eubanks coming a relatively close second, having joined the group for its Fifth Annual Concert Tour in 2008—it's significant that the engine driving the Collective has remained stable since Live: SFJAZZ Center 2013—The Music of Chick Corea & New Compositions (SFJAZZ, 2014), with Simon, Penman and Calvaire. In many ways, it's the ideal confluence of the Collective's ongoing introduction of fresh ideas from new members and an adherence to the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

This constant refreshing of the Collective's lineup has led to a group united in concept if not by specific sound or chemistry, though both can be found in abundance with each lineup...including thus current one. That said, if the group must be placed in a box, the term "modern mainstream" best fits: largely acoustic, with a clear reverence for the jazz tradition while, at the same time, continually introducing ideas from farther afield, often the result of each of its members' work outside the Collective (with every member a leader in his own right), and plenty of the more sophisticated harmonic and rhythmic developments that have earmarked a considerable amount of the music coming from the post-'60s generations.

In recent years the Collective has also begun introducing a little electricity into the picture, with Cohen and Eubanks' tasteful effects first heard on Live in New York Season 8—Music of Stevie Wonder (SFJAZZ, 2011). Here, while still focusing largely on acoustic piano, Simon also adds a chiming Fender Rhodes to "Bitches Brew" and midway through "Tutu," while contributing synthesizer to two originals: Calvaires's numerically driven, polyrhythmic and densely contrapuntal "111"; and Eubanks' relatively (and uncharacteristically) simple yet still far from without its challenges composition, "Shields Green."

Every Davis arrangement, every new original composition, provides plenty of solo space, though the Collective rarely resorts to straight "head-solo-head" formats, instead couching improvisational work without the context of detailed compositional forms. With only two tracks dropping below the seven- minute mark and most tracks more than comfortably breaking the eight-minute threshold, there's a plethora of opportunities for delineated soloing, in-tandem trade-offs, extemporizations bolstered by appealing, four- part horn passages, breakdowns of the Collective into smaller subsets, unfettered free play and full-on octet blowing.

There's an embarrassment of riches to be found across Live: SFJAZZ Center 2016—Music of Miles Davis & Original Compositions' 140-minute program. One of the more intriguing Davis arrangements is Calvaire's "Bitches Brew"—a reading that flirts, at the start, with Joe Zawinul's title track to the trumpeter's similarly groundbreaking record from the previous year, In a Silent Way(Columbia, 1969), before opening up to greater freedom that remains predicated on the many simple but memorable fragments that Calvaire found while researching Davis' many live versions of the tune. The drummer discovered there were no consistent theme(s) across performances and so, he chose a few and arranged around them...most notably Davis' single-note staccato shots. As the track unfolds, what becomes clear is that Calvaire has fashioned a new, more considered arrangement; one that shifts from temporally unfettered free play to a more complexly constructed collection of time-driven brass lines, snaking through the drummer's frenetic playing before a brief but impressive bass solo leads to a near-free-for-all, with only Penman holding down the rhythm as even more frenzied lines emerge, as Calvaire both mirrors their rhythms and fills with reckless abandon before the group finally coalesces with the original track's seven-note ostinato. It's an exhilarating version; one which deconstructs the original's collage construction by producer Teo Macero and reconstructs it into a new form that Davis would never have been able to conceive at the time, based on his recording approach at that juncture in his career.

Calvaire's deconstruction/reconstruction is one of the Collective's approaches to creating 21st century arrangements of timeless classics, as Zenón demonstrated in his arrangement of "Superstition," from the Stevie Wonderset. Still, that shouldn't be taken as a suggestion of predictability; if anything the Collective has demonstrated, year after year, that it has the capacity to breathe new life into well-known material, even when its approach is more literal.

Jones' arrangement of "So What," the opening track to Davis' classic Kind of Blue, may begin with a brief, tightly arranged eight-second ensemble figure before turning more literally to the original's opening bass and piano duo (faithfully transcribed) and what has become one of the most instantly recognizable call-and-response themes in jazz history. Taken at a particular fast clip, re-harmonized and gradually morphing into a newly minted theme that finally comes back to its initial section, it opens up to a fast-swinging solo section for Eubanks. As he signals the end of his solo with a quote of Davis' familiar bass line, Simon picks up the baton for an equally impressive turn: another example of how, bolstered by Penman and Calvaire's unshakable anchor, the pianist constructs motif-driven improvisations that, like Eubanks, possess a clear sense of form, even as they are predicated upon in-the-moment spontaneity.

Zenón, a recipient of both the Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur ("Genius Grant") Fellowships—and a writer capable of bridging the gap between knotty complexity and folkloric innocence/simplicity—delivers a characteristically challenging chart for "Nardis," a modal tune that became much better known through pianist Bill Evans' many recordings. It's also taken at an uncharacteristically bright tempo, with a combination of serpentine lines and stop/start rhythms; a revision of the original melody to include some brief Eastern-tinged tonalities; and enough freedom to allow for a thrilling series of trade-offs (over a more complex form) between Zenón and Wolf before leading to an equally electrifying solo from Calvaire and a breathtaking ensemble conclusion that seems to challenge everyone— players and audience—to keep up.

Eubanks' "Tutu" reshuffles and alters the emphases on familiar but considerably re-harmonized changes, with Simon, Penman and Calvaire's metrically challenging support anchoring a set-defining solo of staggering virtuosity from the trombonist, before the tune finally shifts to the familiar, greasy bass line, muted trumpet theme...and a more atmospheric undercurrent, as Simon switches to Fender Rhodes.

Amongst one of the best sets of new original compositions since the Collective first formed, Penman's metrically challenging "Your Turn" is as worthy of attention as any, as the bassist jokingly describes the composition, in the liner notes, as "a poorly disguised attempt at revenge for many years of hard rhythm parts thrown at me." The first two minutes is a brass chorale of the most contemporary kind, with rhythmic twists and turns, shifting harmonies and staggered interactions leading to a gradually emerging theme and, finally, an extended bass solo of captivating invention, a band reiteration of the introduction and, finally, a series of impressive solos by Zenón, Wolf (who seems to get paradoxically more muscular and lithe with every passing year) and Eubanks.

Despite being a masterful player of frightening virtuosity, Wolf's "In the Heat of the Night" is, instead, a soulful ballad, with a drum groove culled from D'Angelo's chart-topping "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" creating a gentle but groove-heavy foundation for Jones' brief, blues-drenched solo and a lengthier feature for the vibraphonist that slowly builds to a powerful climax.

Elsewhere, Jones' own "Hutcherson Hug" is another extended feature for the vibraphonist; alluding to the affectionate hugs with whom the late vibraphonist met every member of the Collective when he was in the group from 2004 through 2007, it is, indeed, a soft, warm waltz that may feature lush horn arrangements but is, more often than not, a piece that breaks down into smaller group subsets, such as during Penman's solo, where he is supported only by Simon and a brush and cymbal-driven Calvaire. That the composition is not a feature for its composer only points to another characteristic of the Collective: a generous group of musicians who must also, as described by SFJAZZ Founder and Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline, be "good people." Everybody shines, of course, but this is clearly a group with egos checked at the door.

Equally, Sánchez's chant-driven "Canto" may have originally been written for another project and substituted here for the new tune first written by the saxophonist for the tour but, filled as it is with the space and simplicity that often earmarked Davis' work, it's a perfect choice. Filled with burnished brass harmonies, a soft, hand-driven pulse and one of Sanchez's most restrained yet effective solos on record, it's a perfect personal homage to the late trumpeter.

The set closes with Simon's "Feel the Groove." A pianist often associated (as is true of some of his other band mates, most notably Zenón) with music of a more cerebral nature, the composition is driven by a repetitive vibraphone figure and irresistible, loosely played rhythm. Calvaire's combination of cajón and drum kit, a stellar solo from Zenón and then, after an ensemble interlude, Simon's most thought-provoking improvisational turn of the set makes "Feel the Groove" a perfect closer that can be taken as a salve for the soul,while, at the same time, providing plenty of compositional substance for the mind to absorb.

The beauty of SFJAZZ Collective's privately released two and sometimes three-CD sets—which contain performances of all eight arrangements and original compositions—is that while no single live performance can include all sixteen tracks, the albums always provide a sampling of a particular year's full repertoire. While there are no dates currently up on the SFJAZZ site, it suggests that the Collective is continuing to tour these imaginative re-works of Miles Davis tunes alongside the group's new original music. Who the next musician up for tribute is still to be announced, but in the meantime, the SFJAZZ Collective has finally brought the music of Miles Davis into its ever-expanding repertoire, and with Live: SFJAZZ Center 2016—Music of Miles Davis & Original Compositions, released a live document that continues to position the group at the forefront of the modern mainstream...in the broadest, most accomplished fashion possible.

Track Listing: CD1: So What; Nardis; Milestones; Tutu; Bitches Brew; All Blues; Joshua; Teo. CD2: Tribe; Canto; Your Turn; 111; In the Heat of the Night; Shields Green; Hutcherson Hug; Feel the Groove.

Personnel: Miguel Zenón: alto saxophone; David Sánchez: tenor saxophone; Sean Jones: trumpet; Robin Eubanks: trombone; Warren Wolf: vibraphone, marimba; Edward Simon: piano, Fender Rhodes (CD-#4-5), synthesizer (CD2#4-5); Matt Penman: bass; Obed Calvaire: drums.

Title: Live: SFJAZZ Center 2016 - Music of Miles Davis & Original Compositions| Year Released: 2017 | Record Label: SFJAZZ

[sfjazz]

Jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire brings quartet to Bay Area

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/09/jazz-trumpeter-ambrose-akinmusire-brings-quartet-to-bay-area/

Jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire brings quartet to Bay Area

New album features pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown

By ANDREW GILBERT | Correspondent

PUBLISHED: June 9, 2017 at 12:11 pm | UPDATED: June 9, 2017 at 12:12 pm

In a career marked by a succession of creative triumphs, Ambrose Akinmusire has just delivered his most concise and telling musical statement yet.

It might seem strange to describe the Oakland-reared trumpeter’s sprawling new double album, “A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard,” as concise. More than a display of imaginatively virtuosic improvisation, Akinmusire’s third Blue Note release distills the coiled power and emotional range of his working quartet with pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown.

Live recordings from the Vanguard have been consequential because they’ve captured the music’s greatest working ensembles — bands that have attained a preternatural level of communication, like the John Coltrane Quartet, the Bill Evans Trio, the George Adams and Don Pullen Quartet and a succession of Fred Hersch’s trios.

“The Vanguard is a place to highlight a band,” says Akinmusire, 35. All those great albums dealt with band chemistry, the spirit you can only get when you have a band, a group of people trying to reach this other thing.”

He performs a succession of gigs around the region with the quartet, including four sets at the SFJazz Center’s Joe Henderson Lab as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival (June 14-15). For the shows at Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society (June 18) and Kuumbwa Jazz Center (June 19), Jamire Williams (who has been in the studio recently with Herbie Hancock) takes over the drum chair from Brown.

Even before Akinmusire, a Berkeley High grad, won the 2007 Thelonious Monk International Trumpet Competition, he brought an unusual degree of poise and a finely calibrated sense of structure to the bandstand. He has grown into one of jazz’s most esteemed young composers with an array of prestigious commissions, including “The Forgotten Places” for the Monterey Jazz Festival and “banyan” at Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

Part of what makes “A Rift in Decorum” such a welcome addition is that many of the compositions weren’t conceived as grand statements. The tunes often explore a specific mood, texture or idea, unleashing the band to pull at a piece’s seams. The title suggests Akinmusire’s embrace of disruption, though he’s reluctant to assign any specific interpretation to the phrase.

“It could be a rift in my discography, a live album, maybe the only one I’ll ever do,” he says. “Or maybe a rift against the decorum of today. It could also just mean that I divide art in three categories: what it is, what it’s not and what it could be. What it’s not and what it could be are rifts against what it is.”

Providing his band with a steady stream of new material is a strategy that Akinmusire says he gleaned from a conversation with pianist Vijay Iyer (who’s in this area next week as the music director for Cal Performances Ojai at Berkeley festival). Bringing in a few new tunes on every tour “keeps things interesting,” he says. “I understand that rehearsal and performance are part of the compositional process. I never put a period on it and say I’m done. My job is to make it comfortable for people to add themselves to the piece.”

No one has played a bigger role in shaping the quartet’s sound than drummer Justin Brown. A couple years younger than Akinmusire, he was living in Concord when he finagled his way into Berkeley High, drawn by the school’s vaunted jazz program. He made the highly competitive jazz ensemble as a freshman, and forged a tight bond with the trumpeter.

After a two-year stint at the Brubeck Institute, Brown received a scholarship to Juilliard, but decided instead to plunge into the New York scene, aided by the brilliant Cuban saxophonist Yosvany Terry (he had met Terry at the Stanford Jazz Workshop). When Akinmusire returned to New York in 2008 after graduating from the Thelonious Monk Institute’s Masters program in Los Angeles, he tapped Brown for his new band, and the drummer has played on all four of Akinmusire’s albums.

“It was just sort of natural that I started playing with him as his sideman,” says Brown, who works with pianist Gerald Clayton and bassist-producer Thundercat when he’s not engaged with Akinmusire. “From there, the experience was about growing as brothers and musicians. Always expect the unexpected. Always keep that child mentality: Oh, check this out! What are you practicing? Let’s check somebody out.

“It’s been an onward and upward journey.”

Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet

When: 7 and 8:30 p.m.  June 14-15

Where: Joe Henderson Lab, SFJazz Center,  201 Franklin St., San Francisco

Tickets: $35; 866-920-5299, www.sfjazz.org

Also: 4:30 p.m.June 18, Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, 311 Mirada Road, Half Moon Bay, $45/$50, 650-726-4143, www.bachddsoc.org. And 7 p.m., June 19, Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St., Santa Cruz, $25/$30, 831-427-2227, www.kuumbwajazz.org

[sfjazz]

Jacob Collier uses tech to share music of his mind live - SF Chronicle

http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/Jacob-Collier-in-his-room-making-stuff-all-11206157.php

Jacob Collier uses tech to share music of his mind live

By David Wiegand

June 8, 2017 Updated: June 8, 2017 2:16pm

Jacob Collier hit the stage dancing in his stocking feet at his SFJazz debut Wednesday, June 7, and never stopped.

The only time the 22-year-old double Grammy winner was relatively still was when he was seated at the piano, breaking hearts playing and singing “In the Real Early Morning,” which began life as a poem about remembered love.

It was only Collier’s second San Francisco show, after a debut last fall at the Great American Music Hall, but it was the start of a two-month tour that will take him to the Hollywood Bowl this weekend and on to dates across the U.S. and Canada, then to Europe, back to the States, and then back to the United Kingdom.

It’s a packed itinerary, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary for Collier. He’s been on the road pretty much nonstop even before his debut album “In My Room” was released last summer.

Collier grew up (and still lives) in a musical household in London, the oldest of three children. His mother, Susan, is a well-regarded violinist, conductor and teacher, and her son remembers playing a miniature violin at the age of 2. But that part of his career was short-lived, he says at an interview at the Kabuki Hotel before his show.“I can remember giving up the violin at age 4. I made a conscious decision because I wanted faster gratification. I wanted something you could hit and make a sound.”

At the word “hit,” he slams his hands together in the air and half-rises from the couch in the hotel lobby.

Some people talk with their hands. Collier talks with his entire body. Even seated, he is moving. His arms pinwheel or stretch upward as he explains a point, his hands in a continuous pas de deux.

It should be noted that Collier has arrived for the interview wearing a saffron-color T-shirt with the image of a synthesizer on the front, gray sweatpants and stocking feet. All the better to half-slide across the lobby floor to a seating area at the side.

Although largely a self-taught musician, Collier did attend what he calls “normal school” until he was 16, “which was great, because I was surrounded by all kinds of people who were great at lots of kinds of things.”

But he was spending much of his time in one room in the family’s North London home, the room with the piano in it. Over time, it became his bedroom, but more important, it became his studio, and still is. He saved up enough money to buy his first guitar and brought it to the room. Then he saved for a bass guitar, and brought that to the room. He received a double bass for his 14th birthday, a drum kit was added, and then more instruments — a lot more, including instruments he finds as he travels the world performing. The overstuffed room is pictured on the CD cover of “In My Room.”

Collier’s sense of music is, in fact, a heightened sense of sounds, all kinds of sounds.

“To this day, I just sort of enjoy recording with ambient sounds — more than real instruments, actually, because they sound like my life and I enjoy that.”

Sound awareness at that level — “the brain that always hears music,” as he puts it — is never a burden, but Collier admits it’s occasionally good to turn it off.

At 16, he enrolled in the Purcell School, for young music students, in London. At the same time, he began to attend the weekend jazz program at the Royal Academy of Music, and the experience was transformative. Although he’d listened to jazz before, this was the first time he was “able to play jazz with other musicians my age, and that was amazing, because I’d never seen musicians my age who could think in harmonies.”

The program also exposed him to critical thinking and writing about music.

“I knew the sound of playing a D-major five over the note C, but I didn’t know people called that Lydian until I went to the jazz program and I learned that people had a vocabulary with which to work. It was thrilling to me.”

A lot of knowledge became not a dangerous thing, but somewhat of a disruptive thing for Collier as he began to study at the Royal Academy for a degree as a jazz pianist.

“I saw possibilities that weren’t in the textbook,” he says. “I found myself rejecting the norms, what was talked about in how to use different chords and things like that.

“It’s always important to learn the rulebooks so you know where you’re coming from,” he adds, “But I’ve always been somebody who enjoys taking ideas and sort of turning them on their heads. I’ve always had a philosophy of learning that you take what’s useful and you use it in a way that’s useful to you.”

Technology has been especially useful to Collier, who began posting his own multilayered arrangements of songs by Stevie Wonder and others six years ago. Then, as now, the vocal arrangements suggest multiple voices — his style has echoes of Bobby McFerrin, Manhattan Transfer and midcentury vocal ensembles like the Modernaires. But the voices in a Collier song are all his, meticulously matched as if a roomful of Jacobs were singing at once.

Music industry veterans took notice, including Quincy Jones, who signed him to his management company and remains his patron to this day.

“In My Room” includes music by Stevie Wonder, and the theme from “The Flintstones,” but most of the tracks are Collier’s own compositions. The title song is, of course, by Brian Wilson, but it also reflects the album’s genesis in Collier’s room, which is more than just a home music lab.

“My only goal was to try to crystallize that room,” he says, “the feeling of being in that room as Jacob at age 21.”

Making music in a room is one thing, but taking that “room” on tour would have been impossible were it not for an MIT grad student named Ben Bloomberg who contacted Collier through Facebook and said he enjoyed making things. Did Collier have anything in mind? What evolved was a singular miracle of technology, a one-of-a-kind electronic synthesizer that enables Collier to perform live while multiplying and layering his own voice, enhancing it with modulations of the sound of the instruments he’s playing on stage — piano, guitar, bass guitar, bass, drums, cowbells and other percussive instruments.

As he performs, onstage video cameras capture his image and adapt it into an instant animated music video that plays on a large screen behind the stage. The video is grounded not only in what Collier is doing as he whirls around the stage in his ballooning harem pants and oversize white T-shirt, but also in how he is singing — the pitch of his voice, how loud or soft he may be.

Technology is especially empowering for Collier and many other young musicians — it’s what they’ve grown up on. He got his foot in the door on the Internet and immediately embraced technology as integral to his art.

“What tech does really well is distract people,” he says, but “the best use of anybody’s technical skills ... is to serve some sort of emotional thing.” In fact, as he creates, he’s constantly on guard to ensure that the emotional content of his music is dominant.

“Thinking theoretically about things has its dangers, because the more you engage the part of your brain that organizes and puts into plain words and has structures, the less things are able to flow. It’s always important for me to have a really emotional relationship to music and tech.”

Tech and the Internet did not create Jacob Collier — they were always and remain the tools of his artistic trade.

“That’s my story,” he says. “I just started making stuff, and I’ve tried to maintain that — a kid in his room making things.”

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV

Jacob Collier explains negative harmony for dummies: https://playvideo.co/b0a9fe77-b577-4d19-9809-1e3d0fe549a3

[sfjazz]

10 Acts to Catch at the 35th San Francisco Jazz Festival - SF Weekly

http://www.sfweekly.com/music/allshookdown/10-acts-to-catch-at-the-35th-san-francisco-jazz-festival/

10 Acts to Catch at the 35th San Francisco Jazz Festival

Don’t miss The Suffers, Lizz Wright, Cory Henry, and others.

Brett Callwood Fri Jun 2nd, 2017 12:19pm

San Francisco has a rich jazz history. A surge in blue-collar jobs on the docks in the 1940s saw a massive migration of African-Americans to San Francisco and, by 1950, more than 40,000 people lived in Fogtown, the Fillmore district that became known as the “Harlem of the West.”

The first jazz clubs opened in the Tenderloin and North Beach in the late 1940s and, by the mid-‘50s, more budding bar owners had followed suit, opening venues with names like Club Alabam, the New Orleans Swing Club, Elsie’s Breakfast Club, Harold Blackshear’s Cafe Society, The Favor, and the Havana Club.

Since 1983, the San Francisco Jazz Festival has been a highlight of the city’s musical calendar, a celebration of the many branches of the genre ranging from avant-garde to traditional. This year’s event includes more than 40 concerts spread over two weeks.

Here are 10 artists you should definitely check out.

The 35th San Francisco Jazz Festival takes place from June 6 to 18.

Jacob Collier

It’s been a wild couple of years for English singer, multi-instrumentalist, and inventor Jacob Collier. Through self-made, split-screen Youtube videos of him playing every instrument for songs such as Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” he was signed to Quincy Jones’ management company and, towards the end of last year, he released his debut album,In My Room. The man’s a bonafide phenomenon, a 22-year-old musical tour de force. He’s also part mad-scientist, designing and creating tools and devices that allow him to play multiple instruments on stage. See for yourself how he does it.

Lizz Wright

As much as jazz is about instrumentation, it’s also about the voice(s) behind the music. Lizz Wright first got into jazz by singing Billie Holiday songs before she discovered that she’s capable of penning her own sumptuous tunes. She’s released four albums on Verve Records, and her most recent full-length effort, Freedom & Surrender, is her debut for Concord. Wright’s voice is strong and smooth, yet husky, and it’s perhaps best on display in “Nearness of You.

The Suffers

The Houston 10-piece The Suffers have appeared on The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and The Late Show with David Letterman, among other national shows, but there’s no chance anyone is getting sick of this charming outfit anytime soon. Keyboardist Patrick Kelly and bassist Adam Castaneda formed the band six years ago, and it has made steady progress ever since. The self-titled debut album was released last year, and the gloriously multicultural Suffers will be playing a bunch of those tunes during their Jazz Fest performance.

Jake Shimabukuro

There’s only so much you can do with a ukulele, right? WRONG! Jake Shimabukuro is redefining what it means to be a ukulele player to the point that people are actually calling him “the Jimi Hendrix” of the instrument.Just listen to his interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and it’s clear that the ukulele is more emotive than most people give it credit for.

Cory Henry

Cory Henry can almost make his keyboard talk. Seriously, it feels as if the instrument is having a conversation with the super-charming and charismatic Grammy-winning member of Snarky Puppy. Henry will be at Jazz Fest with his band the Funk Apostles, playing a rich blend of gospel, R&B, funk, and jazz.

Derrick Hodge

Philadelphia’s Derrick Hodge is known to hardcore jazz-heads as the longtime bassist for the Robert Glasper Experiment. But he’s also a renowned solo artist, working with Mulgrew Miller, Terence Blanchard, Common, Mos Def, Timbaland, and Maxwell. From that mini-resume, it should be clear that Hodge is able to adapt his skills across genres, and it’s his ability to find the middle-ground where R&B and modern jazz meet that makes him so sought-after. Hodge — who worked on the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and A Take of God’s Will — released his solo debut, Live Today, in 2013. His sophomore effort, The Second, just came out, so expect a lot of tunes from it. This will be an instrumental set, but Hodge’s sound is accessible.

Bokanté

Some of the members of Bokanté are also in Snarky Puppy, but this is an altogether different outfit from the Texas jazz ensemble. The name of the band translates to “exchange” in Antillean Creole, which is spoken on singer Malika Tirolien’s home island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. The band’s multicultural approach is passionate, with lyrical themes that tackle topics like racism, heartbreak,triumph, joy, and protest. Songs such as “Jou Ké Ouvè” are hair-raisingly epic and joyous.

Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra

To really experience a jazz festival, you just have to catch a show by a traditional jazz orchestra. No contemporary frills or R&B/hip-hop twists, just the real, old-school deal. The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra is co-led by saxophonist Jeff Clayton, bassist John Clayton, and drummer Jeff Hamilton, musicians that, between them, have played with the likes of Count Basie, Stevie Wonder, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Woody Herman. These are super-talented instrumentalists, capable of playing just about anything. But as a trio, they keep it smooth and traditional, and that works perfectly.

Jon Jangtet

One of the Bay Area’s own, Jon Jangtet is presenting his “Can’t Stop Crying For America: Black Lives Matter” project at this year’s festival. As the name suggests, this is an important piece of work that Jangtet has completed alongside collaborator and poet Amanda Kemp. Organized into vignettes, each song is named after a victim of violence, like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Jangtet’s set isn’t going to be your average jazz toe-tapper — this one will be saying something.

Marquis Hill Blacktet

Marquis Hill was the winner of the 2014 Thelonious Monk International Trumpet Competition a very prestigious prize in the jazz world. Since then, the Chicagoan has established himself as one to watch in the modern jazz world. The man can wrench a remarkable amount of passion, energy, and warmth out of his trumpet and, while the music of his Blacktet isn’t for every jazz newbie, it’s intricacies are accessible to the casual fan.

[sfjazz]

YouTube star Jacob Collier brings one-man-concert to SF Jazz Festival

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/02/youtube-star-jacob-collier-brings-one-man-concert-to-sf-jazz-festival/

YouTube star Jacob Collier brings one-man-concert to SF Jazz Festival

By ANDREW GILBERT | Correspondent

June 2, 2017 at 1:40 pm

The jazz scene is as susceptible to the beguiling lure of youth as any other corner of the music world, but jazz wunderkinds usually boast far more than a pretty face. In the case of Jacob Collier, the 22-year-old Londoner seems to emanate enough creativity to provision a big band.

With two Grammy Awards for vocal arrangements on his 2016 debut album “In My Room” (Membran), the multi-instrumentalist and vocalist has spent the past few years sharing his outsized talent via YouTube, where his jaw-dropping multi-tracked creations have earned him fans far beyond the usual jazz audience. He performs on opening night of the 35th annual San Francisco Jazz Festival on June 7 at the SFJazz Center (there is a free kick-off outdoor party and concert 5 p.m. June 6 at Octavia and Hayes streets).

While the state-of-the-art building has turned what was once SFJazz’s flagship event into something of an afterthought, the festival returns the organization to its peripatetic roots. Before opening the Center in January 2013, SFJazz rented stages around the region, and for the festival it spreads out through Hayes Valley, presenting some 43 concerts at five venues through June 18.

Presenting Collier in the Miner Auditorium is a neat pairing of artist and venue, as he’s a one-man orchestra intent on exploring the full potential of cutting-edge technology. Drawing on jazz, trip-hop, soul, bossa nova, and a cappella vocal techniques, he’s turned his home studio in a mad scientist laboratory, crafting deliriously entertaining videos like his version of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” (which has garnered more than 2 million views on YouTube).

Now he can take his show on the road with an interactive high-tech set up that allows him to create his multi-tracked music in real time. He started developing the system in 2015 when Ben Bloomberg, a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab, reached out to him on Facebook after stumbling on his YouTube channel. With 3D capture video loops and a specially designed vocal harmonizer, the system they’ve built allows Collier to take his home studio on the road, creating multimedia performances that bring his YouTube creations to life.

“When Ben hit me up via Facebook message he asked me if I had any crazy ideas,” Collier says. “We’ve been inventing ever since. We’ve created a completely solo show, and developed a way to have a big circle of instruments so I can bounce around and play them at the same time. Everything is generated live. I’m taking my room on tour.”

With 10 ideas a minute, Collier seems to contain multitudes, but he acknowledges that to continue to grow as an artist he’ll need to start sharing the stage with other musicians. “You can’t make music on your own for your whole life,” he says.

But even as he welcomes collaborators, Collier sees them as fuel for his solo creations, noting that “making music with other people feeds spontaneity, and lends ideas to your solo work. With others it’s about invention on the spot and having a conversation. Alone, it’s about going in deep, crafting the essence of things, breathing life into these harmonies.”

If Collier wants a superlative case study in the power of collaboration, he could look to drummer Jack DeJohnette, who performs two San Francisco Jazz Festival concerts at Miner Auditorium on June 8 with the new collective quartet Hudson featuring guitarist John Scofield, bassist Larry Grenadier, and pianist/keyboardist John Medeski. The all-star combo released an eponymous album on Motema Music, and the project takes its name from the region all four musicians call home.

With tunes by Dylan and his Big Pink collaborator Robbie Robertson, as well as Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix, the Hudson Valley and its musical history provide a good deal of the band’s inspiration. Appropriately, the musicians first came together in 2014 at the Woodstock Jazz Festival and “it was such a great feeling,” DeJohnette says. “That was from the beginning. The idea was to play grooves and cover songs connected with the Hudson area.”

He has a good deal of history with Sco and Grenadier, but first played with Medeski a few years ago at a concert to raise funds for an organizing seeking to ban fracking in the Hudson Valley.

“When the idea for this group came up he came up immediately,” DeJohnette says. “He composes, arranges, produces, and plays a lot of keyboards. Larry picks some great notes and has a great feel. And Sco and I are always trying to challenge each other with different ways to interpret the tunes and improvise together collectively. We knew we’re going to make some amazing creative discoveries.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.

JACOB COLLIER

Performing at the San Francisco Jazz Festival

When: 7:30 p.m. June 7

Where: Miner Auditorium at SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin St., San Francisco

Tickets: $22.50-$60; 866-920-5299, www.sfjazz.org; festival runs June 6-18, ticket prices vary by event