SF Jazz Spring Season

[Pete C]

Rollins set for SFJAZZ spring season
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
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URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/07/DDGD343TK81.DTL


Saxophonists Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter and many other top artists will perform at SFJAZZ's Spring Season, which features about 30 shows at theaters and concert halls around San Francisco from March 12 through June 25.

The lineup encompasses a broad range of musicians and styles, from the great bop pianist Hank Jones, whose trio will be joined by venerable trumpeter Clark Terry, to Senegal's Orchestra Baobab, Belgian harmonica ace Toots Thielemans, banjoist Bela Fleck with bassist Edgar Meyer, South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and adventurous younger players like saxophonist Chris Potter and pianist Matthew Shipp.

The new SFJAZZ Collective -- an octet that features vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Renee Rosnes and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman (the spring series' artistic director) -- will make its premiere playing its own compositions plus the radical music of Ornette Coleman, whose own quartet plays the Masonic Auditorium on March 20.

Redman will also appear in one of three concerts paying tribute to the late tenor saxophone giant Stan Getz, playing music from the 1967 Getz album "Sweet Rain.'' Pianist Bill Charlap's trio, Brazil's Trio da Paz, and saxophonists Harry Allen and Harvey Wainapel will play Getz's bossa nova and ballads; tenor saxophonist David Sanchez and a string orchestra will play music from Getz's 1961 "Focus" album.

Other promising dates include concerts by Joe Zawinul's Syndicate (the keyboardist's world-music outfit), tap dancers Savion Glover and Ti Dii and the peerless Brazilian singer-guitarist Joao Gilberto, back again for another June performance.

Tickets, $5-$65, go on sale Sunday at (415) 776-1999, sfjazz.org.

Here's the full schedule for SFJAZZ's Spring Season, which actually starts in the winter with a Feb. 7 concert by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre:

March 12: Savion Glover and Ti Dii, 8 p.m., Masonic Auditorium.

March 20: Ornette Coleman Quartet, 8 p.m., Masonic Auditorium.

March 21: Screening of documentary "Ornette: Made in America,'' 7 p.m, Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

April 1: SFJAZZ Collective, 7:30 p.m., Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

April 2: SFJAZZ Collective, 8 p.m., Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

April 3: Charles Lloyd and guests pay tribute to the late drummer Billy Higgins, 8 p.m., Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

April 9: Sam Rivers, Reggie Workman, Jason Moran; William Parker Quartet, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

April 10: Paul Bley, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

April 11: Toots Thielemans quartet, 7 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

April 17: Wayne Shorter Quartet, Brad Mehldau Trio, 8 p.m., Masonic Auditorium.

April 21: Joe Zawinul Syndicate, 7:30 p.m. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

April 30: Joshua Redman and trio play the music of Stan Getz, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 1: Orchestra Baobab, 3 and 8 p.m., Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

May 7: Tribute to Charlie Parker with Gary Bartz, Sonny Fortune, Vincent Herring and others, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 8: Poncho Sanchez, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 9: Jimmy Scott, Madeline Eastman, 7 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 22: Bill Charlap Trio, Trio da Paz, saxophonists Harry Allen and Harvey Wainapel play Getz, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 28: Chris Potter Quartet, Mark Turner Quartet, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 29: Hank Jones Trio with Clark Terry, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

May 30: Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer, 3 and 7 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

June 12: Tomasz Stanko Quintet, 2 p.m., Florence Gould Theatre.

June 13: Matthew Shipp, 2 p.m., Florence Gould Theatre.

June 13: David Sanchez Quartet and strings, 7 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

June 15: Hugh Masekela, 7:30 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

June 18: Sonny Rollins, 8 p.m., Masonic Auditorium.

June 25: Joao Gilberto, 8 pm., Masonic Auditorium.

E-mail Jesse Hamlin at jhamlin@sfchronicle.com.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

I definitely want to see the dancers! If I can manage getting down there two weeks in a row, I might catch up to you for Ornette, David. But I'm calling again at that Maui festival during those April dates you've picked. (It breaks my heart, but somebody's got to do it.)

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Savion laces up
& buckles down



By CELIA McGEE
DAILY NEWS FEATURE WRITER


Tale of the Tap: Savion Glover will be at the Joyce Theater for three weeks.
You haven't seen a man turn into a piano, a sighing flute or a hepcat bass until you've seen tap genius Savion Glover do his choreography to John Coltrane.

The dancers in his group, Ti Dii, follow his movements around the rehearsal studio and channel them.

He has been going through other changes, too.

"It's so clear now," he says. "I feel like all of a sudden I've just got to hit it with my life. "The hanging out is over, the partying hard. This is a serious party."

He turned 30 this year, he points out, and also lost his mentor, "The Man - Gregory Hines." Other tap greats have passed recently. "It's like a sad-happy thing. You lose someone, yet it also makes you stronger."

From the time he hit Broadway in "The Tap Dance Kid" at 11, the word was that Glover could do everything.

He was the young savior - his mama named him with the word in mind - of an old, outmoded dance form.

He was the blood who brought funk to the mainstream, the scrawny kid from Newark who set the dance world on fire with his skinny legs.

He became a "Sesame Street" fixture.

Spike Lee cast him in a movie.

He won a Tony and showed up at the Grammys.

But where has Glover been lately?

Some touring here, a Nike commercial there - nothing like the high profiling of his 1995 Broadway hit, "Bring in 'Da Noise/Bring in 'Da Funk," and the celebrity it entailed, down to headlines for a DWI arrest.

Glover and Ti Dii will be at the Joyce Theater starting tonight for three weeks.

Glover wants to send a message with the concert engagement at the small, prestigious Joyce.

"Broadway is fine," he says, "but being at the Joyce is topnotch. You don't mess around."

Maybe he knows reports have filtered back of his tardiness to recent performances on the road, aggravated by 35-minute-long intermissions.

"You've got to bring your A team," Glover says.

It includes 14-year-old phenomenon Cartier Anthony Williams, and these days a number of women. The program is called "Improvography," a word coined by Hines.

There'll be the Coltrane, and a lot of other "old music," Glover says, "which is new music to me" - Stevie Wonder, Gil Scott-Heron, Sade, Bjork, Nirvana, Chaka Khan. "I love Sinatra. I put the hoofer label also on Jimi Hendrix. Miles Davis, too. They were ahead of their time."

Glover resents people messing with his own timing, by "putting the label on me" of following the lead of hip hop.

"I was spinnin', doing the whole turn-table thing back when I was 10," he says. "I had my speakers out the window - I controlled the neighborhood."

Though Glover will never let go of the signature style he calls "hittin'" - drilling powerfully hard and blindingly fast on the floor with his size 12 1/2 EE shoes - it, too, has made a certain about-face.

The dreadlocked renegade who used to scoff at tap's traditional pride in entertainment, says he accepts that tap is "a form of entertaining, like the old guys did it - they told jokes, sang, held dialogues with the audience. I feel I can spend more time with the audience now."

It's one way he hopes to secure tap's popularity. Another is to keep teaching. Then there are those stealth dance appearances he has been making around town, "sneakin' in without telling anybody. I'm focused on the fact that tap moves the world."


Originally published on December 16, 2003

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Sorry, David, I just checked the real calendar (I haven't entered my 2004 special bookings into all my calendars yet) and I'm calling a hoedown in Ft. Bragg on March 20th. Maybe in May or June.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Yes!! I have the 14th and 15th open at this point. Let me check with Rita's schedule, and we'll see if we can pick one.

[BFrank]

Just might need to see this one:

April 9: Sam Rivers, Reggie Workman, Jason Moran; William Parker Quartet, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

David: We can do Chucho on May 15th. Does that still work?

Anybody else game for this one?

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Originally posted by David Gitin
Yes, that's fine! Let's plan on it.

Early show? We can PM for dinner arrangements as the date approaches, but I want to buy the tickets so I don't change my mind and book a dance.

[Pete C]

I wish I could make it for Ornette & the Rivers/Bley weekend.

Ornette's new quartet is great. The show with Charnett & Denardo was excellent, but I think you'll all really dig this group. Greg Cohen is a great fit for Ornette.

[BFrank]

Just picked up tickets for that Sam Rivers show.
It seems to be selling fast as most all of the "Gold Circle" seats were gone. So if anyone is planning on going I suggest getting tickets soon.

[BFrank]

It's starting.

Anyone going this season?

[BFrank]

Up!

[BFrank]

The NY Times gave the SF Jazz Collective a very positive review. I KNEW I should have gone to that! I'll have to go next year ....

I do have tickets for Sam Rivers on Friday....should be something else!

+++


The SF Jazz Collective in its San Francisco debut Thursday at the Palace of Fine Arts.


CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
In the Land of Alternative Approaches, a New Look for Jazz
By BEN RATLIFF

SAN FRANCISCO, April 3 — In 22 years a nonprofit group called SF Jazz has gone from a dinky outfit presenting the occasional jazz show to the organizer of a regular concert series to a $5 million, year-round operation with educational programs and a highly regarded jazz festival.

Now it has developed its own in-house band, the SF Jazz Collective, with members picked by its leader, the saxophonist Joshua Redman, and SF Jazz's executive director, Randall Kline.

True to the mildly trangressive ethos surrounding issues of taste in Northern California, from alternative-process winemaking to industrial design, the collective does not look or sound like an institutional band. It isn't a flank of 15 utility men in dark suits, with a brass section on risers at the back and big-band charts loading up the music stands. The idea is for the personalities of the musicians not to recede before the weight of the music.

It is smaller than most institutional bands — an octet — and a little experimental in its makeup but not unreasonably so. The group begins with its own internal elements, rather than the material it plays: the members are already known for their individual work, and each represents a different style, locale and era. They are not all old friends of Mr. Redman's, and they don't share friendships from way back; several of them had never met before the group's first rehearsals.

Mr. Redman contends that the band's original reason for being was to commission original works. The idea of covering the jazz repertory was secondary, a helpful toehold for audiences and high-profile programming. In its capacity as a repertory band it will deal with jazz since the 50's — which is very Bay Area, a sexy, slightly hedonistic proposition compared with the way Jazz at Lincoln Center insists on teaching audiences about jazz from its beginnings.

Yet Mr. Redman — who also serves as artistic director for SF Jazz's regular spring season of concerts — is undogmatic to the core. You won't find it stated anywhere in the literature about the group that it is playing only jazz made since the 50's; the band aims to embody a kind of positive, practical spirit of jazz as it is currently played, not a jazz-history mandate with a line drawn at a particular year. Its initial name, the SF Modern Jazz Collective, was scrapped recently when the organization's board felt that "modern" broke up a recognizable brand name. And Mr. Redman sounds thoroughly relieved to be free of the word.

"It's a loaded term," he said, decanting green tea in a Presidio Heights cafe on Friday afternoon before sound check. "I don't really know what it means."

The band's first task, presented at its first public concerts here Thursday and Friday at the Palace of Fine Arts, was to rearrange six Ornette Coleman pieces and to present new commissioned works by each individual member of the band.

To be sure, Mr. Redman and Mr. Kline are stimulated by the example of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis's well-tested band operating within Jazz at Lincoln Center. But in most respects the New York counterpart is a different kind of organization: more earnestly pedantic, more concerned for the cause of the public's knowledge of jazz, less concerned with pushing the identities of its individual players, who have year-round salaried positions.

The SF Jazz Collective begins with modest goals. At the moment it is committed to a week of performances in California each year, preceded by three weeks of rehearsal. (The band road-tested the music in five other California cities last week, before the Palace of Fine Arts shows.)

The group will perform in New York this fall — at one of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center theaters — but won't convene again to work on new material until February 2005, when John Coltrane will be the focus of the repertory project. If SF Jazz can raise the money to build its own year-round concert hall — it is Mr. Kline's current preoccupation — perhaps the band will play more concerts. But the SF Jazz Collective still isn't meant to be anyone's full-time job.

A month each year isn't much action for a band; if it's going to be a real one, with its own sound, it needs gigs. But these musicians are among the most in-demand out there and can't slight their own careers for what's still a fledgling, local enterprise. Also, as Mr. Redman points out, there is a distinct positive side to the limited commitment: rather than being ensconced in one job in San Francisco, the players can all go back into their separate worlds on the various front lines of jazz and return with more accumulated knowledge next year to throw into the vat.

Aside from Mr. Redman, the band includes the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, a bona fide master in postwar jazz and a resident of Montara, just south of San Francisco. Also present is Nicholas Payton, a virtuosic New Orleans trumpeter whose music has lately been a jazz-funk swirl; Renee Rosnes, a formidable post-bop pianist from New York; Miguel Zenón, a young alto saxophonist originally from Santurce, P.R.; Josh Roseman, a New York trombonist who has played a lot of jazz as well as rockish jam-band music; the bassist Robert Hurst, who first became known in the 80's with Mr. Marsalis's quartet; and Brian Blade, an extraordinarily sensitive drummer. Gil Goldstein, a highly admired arranger, worked with the band on shaping the Coleman pieces.

Thursday's concert, opening with the Coleman pieces, began shakily. Mr. Coleman's "Lonely Woman," all medium-slow rubato, lacked some basic bounce; Mr. Blade's coloristic drumming, full of microscopic fills, couldn't be heard in the acoustically torpid hall. Mr. Redman's solo, in discrete parts, built slowly, then seemed to vanish without leaving a mark. The show turned a corner on "Una Muy Bonita," underlined by a bass-and-vibraphone vamp and lit up by a tender, lucid vibraphone solo.

Except for a few bold strokes, Mr. Goldstein's light-handed arrangements allowed the group to sound lithe, like a small band. By the end of the Coleman set, the band had grown comfortable and self-corrected its own mix; it became radiant in "Happy House," and a dialogue between Mr. Zenón on saxophone and Mr. Blade on drums suggested a new and special connection, a eureka moment.

Mr. Zenón came alive again in the concert's second half, especially during his original piece "Lingala." It was a complicated, mature work, moving between an even, nearly Steve Reichesque pulse (Mr. Hutcherson played marimba here) and changing time signatures for the swung sections, including Afro-Latin rhythms. Mr. Blade contributed a decent modal tune, "Wages," in which Mr. Redman played a satisfying, stretched-out solo, exposing much more of his gift as a narrative improviser.

Ms. Rosnes's piece, "Of This Day's Journey," merged ballad and burning-tempo music. Mr. Hutcherson presented a humorous piece, "March Madness," in which a comically stiff march rhythm kept popping up amid more flowing rhythmic sections. For an encore Mr. Payton provided "From Darkness to Light," the most open, free and aggressive of the original pieces. Even in a free piece, this band has enough inner connections; it's going to improve.

It was all better and more flexible than I had expected: what at first sounded like a scientific recipe for a pan-stylistic new jazz group turned out to be a graceful coup of planning. And though its members aren't all from here, the group's obvious pluralism and its blithe insistence on the new suggest the feeling of this place in a natural way.

[BFrank]

Just added:
Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland and Brian Blade - four superlative jazz artists - in concert together for the first time. Celebrated jazz pianist Herbie Hancock "one of the most revered... figures in jazz" (All Music Guide) and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, "one of the few last deities of jazz" (NY Times) will be joined by bassist Dave Holland, "one of the finest jazz bassists of his generation" (BBC) and Brian Blade, "the drummer of the future" (Joshua Redman).

Saturday, June 19, 8pm
Masonic Auditorium, SF