SF Jazz Festival

[Lois Gilbert]

Randall Kline, the Executive Director of SFJAZZ--the leading non- profit jazz organization on the West Coast--today announced the complete artist line-up for the 25TH Anniversary San Francisco Jazz Festival. The Festival will begin with John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension on September 22.

The season will continue through November 30 and will include some of the most illustrious names in music, including: Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Pharoah Sanders, Ahmad Jamal, Ravi Shankar, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Caetano Veloso, Kurt Elling, Youssou N'Dour, Dr. John, Isaac Delgado, Fred Hersch, Jacky Terrasson, Kronos Quartet with Glenn Kotche, Jason Moran, and this year's Beacon Award Winner, Pete Escovedo and his Latin Jazz Orchestra.

Over 25 years, the San Francisco Jazz Festival has grown from a three-day event called ”Jazz in the City,” to a year-round, internationally recognized celebration of jazz. The Festival's 25TH Anniversary season commemorates years of unforgettable performances with a schedule that touches on highlights from the past quarter-century while pointing the way ahead to many more years of music. With over 30 world-class artists from every corner of the globe presented at San Francisco's most revered venues, this fall will be a delight for music fans of every stripe.

“The 25th Anniversary season is an opportunity to revisit favorite artists while presenting the Festival debut of some exciting new talents,” said SFJAZZ Executive Director Randall Kline. “All these artists, whether established or on the cutting edge, are at the forefront of their respective musics.”

For the 25TH Anniversary, SFJAZZ is presenting special “encore performances” by Festival veterans including Ornette Coleman (10/28), Dee Dee Bridgewater (10/19), Caetano Veloso (11/17), Ahmad Jamal (10/21), Herbie Hancock (11/10) and more.

SFJAZZ is proud to present the world premiere of “New Work” by the special pairing of the Kronos Quartet with Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche (10/25-26); the West Coast premiere of the SFJAZZ/Duke University commissioned multimedia work “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959” by pianist Jason Moran (11/2); a “New Work Showcase” by the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra and the Jon Jang Seven (10/19); and the new major work from Grammy-nominated percussionist John Santos, “Traditions in Transition”--a suite exploring the past, present, and future of Afro-Latin music--created in collaboration with SFJAZZ's own High School All-Stars, and joined by special guests (11/11).

Over the years, SFJAZZ has been known and lauded for its unique musical pairings and thematic presentations. This Festival is no exception with offerings that include “New Orleans on Nob Hill” with Dr. John, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias (10/27); “Ritmo Latino” with the Conga Kings: Candido, Patato and Giovanni Hidalgo (11/9); a piano double bill with Herbie Hancock and Gonzalo Rubalcaba (11/10); Dutch supergroup Willem Breuker Kollektief in “Live Jazz + Silent Film: Faust” (10/31); a coda to the Spring Season Monk Tribute with “Monk's Music” featuring T.S. Monk Sextet and Monk's Music Trio (10/24); and Dorado Schmitt's Django Reinhardt Festival Band with Cuban clarinetist and saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera (11/4).

Vocal talents in the San Francisco Jazz Festival include Grammy-winner Dee Dee Bridgewater (10/19); a double bill with Grammy-winner Kurt Elling and Nancy King (11/10); rising star singers Jacqui Naylor and Spencer Day (11/3); and “World Voices” including Cape Verdean singer Sara Tavares (10/21); Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso (11/17); Senegalese master Youssou N'Dour (11/30); Portugese chanteuse Cristina Branco (11/11); and a special winter concert with legendary Israeli vocalist Chava Alberstein (12/9).

Always on the lookout for new talent, this Festival presents up-and-coming artists on the national and international scene including a double bill of cutting-edge groups Happy Apple and Kneebody (11/7); saxophonist Anat Cohen (10/27); and Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen (11/4).

Each fall, SFJAZZ honors a member of our community who has played a vital role in preserving the traditions and fostering the growth of jazz in the Bay Area. The 2007 honoree, legendary percussionist Pete Escovedo, is an exemplar of everything the Beacon award stands for. He will lead his Latin Jazz Orchestra with Special Guests for the SFJAZZ Beacon Award concert on October 27.

One of the many benefits of SFJAZZ Membership is unparalleled access to the music and musicians. The 2007 Spring Season continues this tradition with a variety of exciting SFJAZZ Members-Only events and other special perks: Tuesday, September 18, 6PM, “Coltrane: The Story of a Sound” Listening Party with New York Times critic Ben Ratliff, held on the release date of Ratliff's book of the same title. Sunday, October 28, 2PM, Jacky Terrasson, solo piano.

SFJAZZ, in addition to being the largest non-profit jazz presenter on the West Coast, is a year-round education organization that offers a dynamic and innovative array of artistic and educational programs in the concert hall, classroom, and community. This spring, SFJAZZ offers the following education programs in connection with the SFJAZZ Spring Season.

* “Inside Jazz”presentations are pre-concert talks taking place one hour before curtain time at selected concerts. They are led by jazz artists, scholars, and industry professionals and are free to ticket holders for the event to follow and offer insight and appreciation of selected concerts and films.

* SFJAZZ Family Matinees are discount-priced afternoon performances featuring artists in shorter programs that give families with children a chance to experience world class music first-hand. See ticket order form for pricing.

* SFJAZZ Discover Jazz: History & Appreciation Course is a weekly evening music appreciation course for adults offering entertaining, informative insights into jazz music, history and culture.

SFJAZZ, now in its 25th year, is the largest non-profit presenter of jazz in the western United States. SFJAZZ presents over 100 concerts a year to over 100,000 fans and is dedicated to advancing the art form of jazz and cultivating new jazz audiences through artistic and education programming, including: The San Francisco Jazz Festival, SFJAZZ Spring Season, SFJAZZ Collective, SFJAZZ Summerfest, SFJAZZ Education and SFJAZZ Membership.

[bluenoter]

Complete festival schedule, tickets, etc.: Click the banner or

http://www.sfjazz.org/concerts/2007/fall/index.asp

[stevebop]

From The SF Chronicle:

SFJAZZ AT 25

DAVID RUBIEN

Sunday, October 14, 2007
Randall Kline's love of jazz defines the festival. Photo ... Ornette Coleman, who has performed at past SFJazz festiva...

Randall Kline, head honcho of the San Francisco Jazz Festival since its inception 25 years ago, is not shy about discussing his baby. The musicians' weird habits, the near-disasters, the budgets, the pluses and minuses of different venues - you name it, he'll chat about it, and generously.

But midway into a recent conversation about the festival's 25th anniversary, Kline's attention starts to wander. The subject has come around to the SFJazz Collective - the blazing octet formed four years ago to take the festival's mission around the world - and Kline, 54, would rather listen than talk.

He heads over to the desk in his Embarcadero Center office, grabs a DVD and sticks it into the computer. It's a recording - not meant for release - of the Collective playing at a 4,000-seat amphitheater in Vienne, France, over the summer, and the group's new tenor saxophonist, Joe Lovano, is tearing it up. Kline, who must have viewed the show dozens of times, locks onto the screen. He's trying not to show too much emotion, yet clearly he's in some minor throes of ecstasy.

As he sits watching the entire tune, it becomes clear how he's done something close to impossible - how in 25 short years he's turned an organization that presents a type of music that less than 10 percent of music consumers listen to regularly into a major Bay Area cultural institution.

It comes down to something absurdly fundamental: He's a fan. He simply loves jazz. And while it's easy to point to any number of factors that have made SFJazz the powerhouse it's become, the bottom line that cuts through all the explanations - the factor that ultimately manifests in the live music presented - is Kline's love for the art form.

Finally dragged away from the computer monitor, Kline scans the brochure for the 25th anniversary festival, SFJazz's biggest ever, which begins Wednesday on a spiritual note with tenor saxophone stalwart Pharoah Sanders playing Grace Cathedral.

"I'm proud of the way it all fits together," Kline says. "Look at the Halloween show - we're screening 'Faust,' the great 1926 silent film with the Willem Breuker Kollektief from Holland playing live accompaniment," he says. "That's just three nights after Ornette Coleman plays, and before that we have (Cuban star) Issac Delgado doing his thing at Bimbo's, which couldn't be a better venue for what he does. ... There are all these beautiful little niches, from the (pianist) Fred Hersches to the (guitarist) John Abercrombies. ... Ravi Shankar with his daughter, Anoushka; (pianist) Gonzalo Rubalcaba with Herbie Hancock."

Kline could have gone on, considering there are 28 more shows than he mentioned. For example, there are the pianists Ahmad Jamal, Jacky Terrasson, Jason Moran, Jon Jang, and Renee Rosnes; the countries Brazil, Portugal, Senegal, Cape Verde, Israel, Bulgaria, Mali and Norway are represented; the Kronos Quartet performs a new piece by rock band Wilco's drummer Glenn Kotche; Dr. John leads a night of New Orleans specialties; Thelonious Monk's son, drummer T.S., is in the house; and local percussion ace and festival perennial John Santos leads the SFJazz High School All-Stars.

It's the kind of lineup that jazz pianist and SFJazz board member Shelly Berg calls "careful eclecticism" - meaning there's a method to the madness - and the fascinating thing is that the approach was there from the beginning. That was in 1983, when Kline and his then-business partner Clint Gilbert put on a Jazz in the City Festival over two days at Herbst Theatre, plus a free outdoor show on the Embarcadero. In that first year, Bebop and Beyond played straight-ahead jazz, stride pianist Mike Lipskin honored an old-school style, Kwaku Dadey was the international representative, Orquesta Batachanga played Latin jazz and the Now! Artet pointed to the future.

It's a formula that "hasn't changed in 25 years," Kline says. "But what we ended up doing was extracting those interest areas and giving them their own nights ... because people like what they like, generally. You can look at the festival and go, 'Wow, look at the diversity.' But the truth is, if you want to see Ornette Coleman you can go see Ornette, and if you want to see Dr. John, you can go see Dr. John, but you probably won't see them the same night - although that would be an interesting double bill," he adds, laughing.

Call it diverse, call it eclectic, Kline doesn't think the formula would work without the sophistication of the Bay Area audience. Board member Berg, who ran the jazz department at the University of Southern California for eight years (he's now music dean at the University of Miami), agrees.

"People used to ask me, 'Could we have a jazz festival in L.A. like the San Francisco Jazz Festival?' And I said no," Berg says. "That's because what's popular in San Francisco is open to a broader range of things. A broader range of art is considered mainstream in San Francisco."

Of course, audience and performance are just two parts of the three-part equation that equals a successful arts organization. The third is the ability to run a business. Kline has it, which is impressive considering he's a college dropout who was studying music, not business. It's astonishing to some of the high-powered members of the SFJazz board of directors, such as the chair, Srinija Srinivasan, who is a vice president and editor in chief at Yahoo.

"To go from a few free concerts 25 years ago to what is now a world-renowned institution is remarkable," she says. "Randall has that rare combination of artistic sense and business savvy. You combine that and you can build something out of nothing."

That's a bit of an exaggeration. There was some luck involved, too. As Kline explains it, his old partner, Gilbert, knew a huge jazz fan who happened to work for the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund (now called Grants for the Arts) - Kary Schulman. Schulman encouraged the two young entrepreneurs to stage a jazz festival, and issued them a $10,000 grant to get it rolling. When the pair secured another $10,000 grant from the San Francisco Foundation, Jazz in the City was on its way.

"We wanted to create an infrastructure for jazz presenting that would have some kind of permanence," Kline says. "How could we support that? In 1983 our exercise was to look at the models that were out there and see if we could apply those models to a jazz organization. The most successful example right in our backyard was the San Francisco Symphony. It's one of the most successful symphony orchestras in the country - how do they do it? We read their annual reports, we talked to them.

"It was all seat-of-the-pants, but we were tenacious," Kline continues. Grants led to more grants and finally to a permanent grant writer. Now SFJazz has a $5.5 million budget, which includes the spring season inaugurated in 2001 in addition to the fall festival. Roughly half the money comes from grants and other contributions, the rest from ticket sales. Kline hopes to sell 40,000 tickets this fall.

SFJazz has catapulted into the front rank of world jazz festivals, rivaling behemoths like Umbria and Montreal, and pretty much owning the U.S. field except for JVC in New York and the Monterey Jazz Festival.

"The San Francisco Jazz Festival is a flagship for the re-emergence of jazz music around the world," says Zakir Hussain, the tabla maestro who has played many of Kline's festivals as well as dozens of others around the globe. "For so many decades, jazz musicians have had to look at Europe for their main gigs, but San Francisco has changed that. It's become one of the best festivals in the world."

To Schulman, who is still at Grants for the Arts, what the festival has accomplished "is just awe-inspiring. ... We had no idea in those early days that when we put a little money in the hands of those eager young men that they'd take the ball and run with it. ... It's knowing what you're doing, taking your enthusiasm and building it over time into an institution."

The next step for the festival, Kline says, is to find a building of its own - something, perhaps, with several self-contained venues, like Jazz at Lincoln Center.

"There's an advantage to being the gypsy presenter we are, and, in fact, our character is tied up in that - the multiple venues, the chance to move around the city," Kline says. "But the arc of the institution is having a home - and that's what we're looking at, finding a home for SFJazz. In the next year or so we'll be able to figure out if we can hone that vision a little more. It's the next logical evolutionary step, given the size that we're at."

[David Gitin]

Last night's Dee Dee Bridgewater show with ten musicians: Dee Dee, her trio with Edsel Gomez, Ira Coleman, and the Argentine drummer whose name escapes me, plus Malian players and singers, gave a superb two hour performance. I drove up from Monterey to San Jose and Mike Schwartz drove us up to San Francisco; we had great seats and BFrank sat two rows behind us. At the reception afterward we met Dee Dee's Mom and chatted with Dee Dee. Two nights earlier the three of us heard Matthew Shipp's trio with Joe Morris and Whit Dickey at Yoshi's (not part of the SF Jazz festival), also an excellent performance.

[Mike Schwartz]

The Bridgewater concert was quite an experience....more than a few wonderful sights to accompany all the sounds!

I'd been 'living' with her new "Red Earth" CD for a few weeks now that I like a great deal, as she will be on my weekly program tomorrow morning at 9AM.

As one would hope, the live act went way beyond the recording.

The two BFrank sightings in one week after all the years on the BBS were a bonus

David and I met friends of mine (Bill & June) who also came up from San Jose who we shared a quick bite before the show.

Bill & June and some other close friends met this morning for coffee and conversation, which we do regularly. These folks aren't jazzers, but seem to like all kinds of things. Bill liked the show very much, and June didn't enjoy it much at all...........her expectation was to see this great *jazz singer* she was told she'd be seeing, and something completely different happened that wasn't working for her.

[Mike Schwartz]

Unhappily, I didn't get to have Ms. Bridgewater on the program this morning.

The publicist's office totally screwed up.........I did speak to her as she was about to get on a plane to Seattle for tonight's Earshot Festival concert.

These things happen.
The concert, the repeated listening of the CD, and the meet & greet after the show were all quite a pleasant experience.

[BFrank]

Two great shows this week - and with "the guys" both times! A treat to meet Schwartz & Gitin in person.

Shipp was amazingly physical and the trio was a solid complement to his music. At first they seemed as if they were just colorizing his themes, but as the evening wore on (1 tune for the hour) they became more and more dominant - highlighted by Whit Dickey's amazing drum solo.

Dee Dee's show was a whole other affair. Great audience - she has a solid following in SF. Her mother and sister were there, as well. A WIDE range of music, mostly from her new album (which I don't have ... YET). For me the highlight was her interpretation of Nina Simone's "Four Women". But all the tunes were well conceived - from traditional Griot tunes to Les McCann's "Compared to What". See this show if it comes to your town!

[Valerie]

Originally Posted by BFrank

Two great shows this week - and with "the guys" both times! A treat to meet Schwartz & Gitin in person.

Dee Dee's show was a whole other affair. Great audience - she has a solid following in SF. Her mother and sister were there, as well. A WIDE range of music, mostly from her new album (which I don't have ... YET). For me the highlight was her interpretation of Nina Simone's "Four Women". But all the tunes were well conceived - from traditional Griot tunes to Les McCann's "Compared to What". See this show if it comes to your town!

sounds like her show was quite different from what david and i experienced onboard the rotterdam this summer!! glad you got to be in the company of three of my favorite guys: david, mike and peter!

[David Gitin]

Yes, Valerie, it was a substantially better show.

(and BFrank, that one tune Shipp worked with was a kind of fantasia on "My Funny Valentine")

[BFrank]

Originally Posted by David Gitin

(and BFrank, that one tune Shipp worked with was a kind of fantasia on "My Funny Valentine")

Yeah, you mentioned that the other night. Somehow I missed that connection at the time.