SFJAZZ presents another great line-up of jazz stars for its Fridays at Five sessions this month – Laurie Anderson and Tammy Hall, the ACS Trio , Cindy Blackman Santana and Jane Monheit.

In November 2018, Laurie Anderson opened her week-long residency as Artistic Director of SFJAZZ with a World Premiere collaboration with Bay Area-based pianist and composer Tammy Hall, presenting a program of original songs written by each of them. Anderson is renowned for her highly inventive music and innovative use of technology, and Hall for her core sound of jazz, gospel and classical music, and it was Tammy Hall’s piece For Miss Jones which provided the inspiration for this program. Laurie had the idea of performing a collection of pieces which they’ve written for women, and presenting a program “that crosses back and forth from jazz to stories to electronics”. This is the fabulous result.

Laurie Anderson & Tammy Hall feature in the SFJAZZ Fridays at Five session on March 5th.

A particularly noteworthy event at SFJAZZ was the appearance in November 2015 of the ACS Trio. Comprising visionary pianist, composer and bandleader Geri Allen, bassist Esperanza Spalding – Best New Artist at the 2011 GRAMMY awards – and 2021 NEA Jazz Master, drummer, composer and bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington, this performance brought together three of the most important female jazz instrumentalists of recent times. The formation of the ACS Trio came about following the collaboration of these three artists on Carrington’s GRAMMY Award-winning album, The Mosaic Project. Sadly, though, this concert marked the final appearance at SFJAZZ of the highly influential Geri Allen before her passing in 2017.

The ACS Trio can be seen on the SFJAZZ Fridays at Five session on March 12th.

In the following week’s concert, recorded at SFJAZZ in January 2017, virtuoso drummer Cindy Blackman Santana curated a tribute to her mentor and primary source of inspiration, master drummer Tony Williams. Among the artists who joined her for the performance were Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Terence Blanchard, Edward Simon, Matt Penman, members of the SFJAZZ Collective, and the Kronos Quartet with whom she premiered the SFJAZZ-commissioned Rituals in 1990, which also featured Herbie Hancock. Notable landmarks in Blackman Santana’s career were her collaborations with artists such as Lenny Kravitz, Pharoah Sanders, Joe Henderson, and her husband, guitarist Carlos Santana, and she was part of the all-star line-up performing Bitches Brew, a tribute to the Miles Davis album, during the 2010 San Francisco Jazz Festival and NYC Winter JazzFest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqutO87D6DI

Cindy Blackman Santana’s performance honoring Tony Williams can be seen on the SFJAZZ Fridays at Five session on March 19th.

Vocalist Jane Monheit – with her “voice of phenomenal beauty” (New York Times) – takes to the digital stage on the last Friday of the month. Backed by her longtime trio, Jane paid tribute to the legendary Ella Fitzgerald in a concert recorded at SFJAZZ in July 2017, performing numbers from her 2016 Emerald City release The Songbook Sessions. As evidenced by all her albums, Jane has an obvious affinity for the Great American Songbook, the Brazilian pop of Ivan Lins and the songs of Paul Simon, Judy Collins and Judy Garland, but it’s her passion for, and ease of performance with, the songs of Ella Fitzgerald which really defines her first love in music.

Jane Monheit stars in the SFJAZZ Fridays at Five session on March 26th.

Fridays at Five is a weekly membership-based online concert series that enables jazz fans to enjoy exclusive hour-long broadcasts of SFJAZZ Center archival performances, while providing support for the artists who would normally be presenting live shows.

Access to Fridays at Five is easy. For just $5 a month ($60 annually) you can sign up for – or gift – a digital membership and tune in with friends each Friday at 5.00 pm (Pacific). That’s 1.00 am GMT and 2.00 am CET on Saturday morning – for night owls. Proceeds will help the SFJAZZ team prepare to reopen the SFJAZZ Center and bring you the same breadth of live concert and educational programming you’re used to. The music, as they say at SFJAZZ, will outlive the virus.

For more details, visit the SFJAZZ website.

Information sourced from:

SFJAZZ program notes

Artists’ websites

ArtsPreview home page

The third program in San Francisco Ballet’s digital season, which opens on March 4th, features two of the most successful works in the Company’s contemporary repertoire – Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9 from his Shostakovich Trilogy, and Swimmer by Choreographer in Residence Yuri Possokhov. The program also heralds another World Premiere for San Francisco Ballet – Wooden Dimes by Danielle Rowe.

Wooden Dimes takes its name from the American saying “don’t take any wooden nickels” – meaning beware of allowing yourself to be swindled or manipulated – and is set in the 1920s, with art deco designs, and a fabulous jazzy original score by composer James M Stephenson. It focuses on the deterioration of the relationship between husband and wife, Robert and Betty Fine. Robert does a mundane, repetitive, job while Betty climbs the ladder to stardom in the theatre, and the more successful she becomes, the harder it is to maintain the pure love which they had initially shared.

The rehearsal process for this ballet involved remote collaboration with the composer, with costume designer Emma Kingsbury, and the lighting designers Jim French and Matthew Stouppe. Director of Photography Heath Orchard worked with the choreographer and dancers both remotely via teleconference and in person, and the finished product – Danielle Rowe’s first mainstage production for the Company – was filmed at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House.

Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9 is the first part of his fabulous and highly successful Shostakovich Trilogy – a work which was co-commissioned by American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet in 2012, and which earned the choreographer his second Prix Benois de la Danse in 2014. The Trilogy is Ratmansky’s tribute to the music of Shostakovich, a composer who has long held a fascination for him, each section – set to Shostakovich’s Symphony No 9, his Chamber Symphony and his Piano Concerto No 1 – reflecting a different phase of the composer’s life during the tumultuous years of the Stalinist era.

Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No 9 at the end of the Second World War. It was supposed to be a grand triumphal work, celebrating the defeat of the Nazis, instead of which the composer – in one of his acts of rebellion – produced a symphony that was somewhat critical of Stalin’s Russia, and after its premiere performance in 1945, the piece was not performed again until after Stalin’s death.

With scenic designs by George Tsypin and costumes by Keso Dekker, this dramatic work features five principal characters – two lead couples and a solo male dancer. The first couple represents Shostakovich and his wife, supporting each other in a time of great personal danger, when he was in constant fear of arrest. The other couple leads the corps de ballet which is representative of the Soviet regime. The ballet, however, is not devoid of hope which comes in the form of a dancer whom Ratmansky calls the Angel, who shows that a way through the turmoil can be found.

Yuri Possokhov’s Swimmer, premiered by San Francisco Ballet in 2015, must still rate as one of the most unusual and creative experiences staged by the Company. Inspired by John Cheever’s 1964 surrealist short story, The Swimmer, the ballet was Possokhov’s tribute to American culture, recounting the experiences of a man who ‘swims’ his way back home from work through a series of pools belonging to his neighbors, ultimately finding his home empty and abandoned.

Possokhov doesn’t relate Cheever’s story as such, but through a series of fascinating scenic designs by Alexander V Nichols, and video projections by Kate Duhamel, he highlights, in each of these ‘pools’, an aspect of American culture, portraying impressions of works by Mike Nichols, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Hopper, J D Salinger and Jack London.

The unusual score was devised by Shinja Eshima – double bassist of both the San Francisco Ballet and San Francisco Opera orchestras – with the addition of four songs by the gravelly-voiced Tom Waits. Costume design is by Mark Zappone.

Wooden Dimes, together with archival captures of Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9 and Yuri Possokhov’s Swimmer, streams online from March 4th to 24th. Tickets and packages may be purchased online at sfballet.org where further information is available.

Information sourced from:

San Francisco Ballet program notes

Classical Music

ArtsPreview home page