ON the Beat | Riffing on Jazz and a San Francisco Jaunt

Up by the Bay, Seeking Sounds

Jazz, for all its depth, historical weight, and status as “America’s greatest indigenous art form” has often had to fend for itself and the survival of the idiomatic species. The support system is often fickle and fleeting, the audience is marginal compared to more mainstream pop cultural forces, and the more commercial flavors tend to bogart the spotlight.

But for a century-plus, the music has survived and even thrived on its own feisty terms, with some institutional aid — not to mention the music’s welcome mat in Europe and internationally. Encouraging signs abound, in the form of festival culture (e.g. the Winter Jazzfest taking place in New York this month and the great September-based Monterey Jazz Festival close to our home). Jazz also gets some periodic love through concerts sponsored by established organizations, academic and otherwise, such as UCSB Arts & Lectures and “Jazz at the Lobero” in our town.

L.A. still lacks a solid, centralized jazz space, although various clubs and L.A. Philharmonic–hosted shows make token appearances on the calendar. NYC has its vibrant Jazz at Lincoln Center (on Columbus Circle) compound.

And up north, S.F. proudly boasts its admirable “house of swing and other things,” SFJAZZ Center, devoted to jazz “creation, presentation and education.” After too many years of trying to get there, I finally made it to the famed space in the Bay Area this past weekend and was duly wowed.

As has often been said of the full-service theater and jazz nucleus, every city worth its salt should emulate the model of this operation. Growing out of the 2004-spawned SFJAZZ Collective (which has appeared a few times at Campbell Hall), the SFJAZZ Center’s dazzling building/space — nearby the major cultural real estate of the Opera House and the Davies Symphony Hall — was made possible by donors and especially the fiscal firepower of a hefty anonymous gift in 2013.

Easing into the new year, last week’s program featured the tasty and only jazz-spiced fare of the South Carolinian Gullah-rooted band Ranky Tank (which also impressed at Campbell Hall two years back). The special guest sauce came courtesy of the dynamic vocalist Lisa Fischer, a cherished backup singer to the stars and stand out in the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. Fischer fit beautifully into Ranky Tank’s sweet hybrid stew of Southern flavors, gospel, and R&B.

SFJAZZ Center ranks highly on the to-check-out list for any jazz aficionado or aficionado in training when in the vicinity or willing to make the pilgrimage. Looking at the 2024 calendar, plenty of bonafide jazz is headed to the compound, including shows from artists-in-residence, guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Kenny Barron, fascinating young pianist James Francies, Chucho Valdes, and Dianne Reeves. Check it out here.

Late on Friday night, leaving the Center with a festive buzz in my head, I recalled hearing about the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival that night and raced over to the Mission District home of the Victoria Theater — reportedly the city’s oldest continuously running theater — a City Landmark launched in 1908. The festival made for a sharp and heady shift of cultural genres, attitude, and performance presentation: tape music, the domain of electronic and computer music, with roots in Musique Concrete does its business in the dark, as pre-sculpted works are played in multi-speaker, surround sound spatiality. Visual distractions are kept to a minimum, but the collective experience of music unveiled for a listening audience remains.

The concert I caught included an introductory piece by Musique Concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer and Luciano Berio’s text-based kaleidoscope Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), from 1958, but mostly focused on pieces by living composers/creators from the last few years. Maria Pelekanou’s Nach der Stille deftly melded minimal sonic swirls, heartbeats, and shifting dynamics, while Thom Blum’s Telescopic 1 – zoom out lives up to its title, expertly manipulating timbres and densities in four-dimensional space. Timothy Roy’s closing Brompton & Braeswood opened splashily but sidled into evocative natural sounds — rain, gull calls — making for an agreeable nature-meets-digital sound mash-up.

Experimental music fans (we know who we are) have had the pleasure of hearing “tape music” at UCSB’s Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall over many years, going back to Emma Lou Diemer’s era as an electronic music professor. The tradition continues with such current UCSB resources as CREATE (The Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology), founded by JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and co-directed by Curtis Road.

For an ongoing go-to art/music experience when in S.F., proceed to the fifth floor of SFMOMA and bask in the multi-screen, video-music wonder of Icelandic artist-musician Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors. Filmed, in real time, in a rustic Hudson Valley mansion in 2012, the piece features musicians in separate rooms — seen and heard on separate screens in the large darkened gallery — plugged into an extended folk-jam piece laid out by Kjartansson in the bathtub. A recurring refrain: “once again I fall into my feminine ways.”

Come on by and sit a spell, or lay down on the floor, for a few minutes or an hour. The Visitors is like nothing you’ve seen/heard before, an ambient avant-folk chillout phenom which feels right at home in S.F. (well, especially the old order, pre-Google S.F.).

Scenes from S.F. including Jim’s diner (left) and Vesuvio Cafe. | Credit: Josef Woodard

To-Doings

Camerata Pacifica’s 2023-24 season dusts off the residue of holiday respite and jumps back into action next Friday, January 19, at Hahn Hall. The enticing old-new program consisting of the trusty stuff of Brahms and Mendelssohn but also French-Slovenian composer Vinko Globokar and, most intriguing of all from the perspective of fresh repertoire, Greek composer Christos Hatzis’s Fertility Rites for five octave marimba and tape, a showcase for CamPac’s gifted percussionist Ji Hye Jung.

CAMA’s orchestral series, which reached a high point with December’s L.A. Philharmonic concert led by Zubin Mehta, moves ahead into the new year with a return visit from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, at the Granada on Wednesday, January 17 (see story here).

The first notable pop show in town this year lands in the ever-inviting Marjorie Luke Theatre on Monday, January 15, a juicy double-header with Amy (Indigo Girls) Ray (see Leslie Dinaberg’s story here) and the substantial mid-career singer-songwriter Dar Williams. Williams has made a good impression on visits to town in the past, and high time for a return encounter.