Author Archives: Andrew Gilbert
Take it to the street: Jazz on 4th benefits Berkeley High
For the impressive cast of young jazz musicians at Berkeley High, the road to Cuba runs right through Fourth Street. On Sunday from noon to 5:00 p.m., the 17th Annual Jazz on Fourth Street Festival transforms the upscale commercial district into a welcoming street fair with food booths, and two music stages. Funds raised at the event through raffle tickets and sale of beer and sake go directly to Berkeley High Jazz Program, funding travel to festivals, scholarships, and this year, the band’s first trip to Cuba.
“The band has toured Europe and Japan many times, but this is especially cool because it’s not something the ensemble has done before,” says drummer Lev Facher, a senior. “There’s also something of a community-service aspect, as we’ve also been raising money to bring various musical, medical and household supplies to families in Havana. It’s a little more fulfilling in that way. The band is definitely buzzing.” … Continue reading »
Barbara Dane celebrates 85 years of life, music at Freight
Barbara Dane was born in Detroit in 1927, and she was reborn musically in Berkeley about 25 years later. Possessing a big, bold, beautifully expressive voice, she had already earned a reputation as a gifted folk singer and musical activist who had campaigned against racial discrimination with Pete Seeger when she and first husband, folk singer Rolf Cahn, relocated to the Bay Area in the late 1940s.
After serving as the host of a pioneering folk television show broadcast on KGO TV, she was recruited as the founding member of a group conceived as a West Coast version of the hugely popular Weavers. But when Dane bailed on the project at the last minute due to creative and other differences, she was left in something of a quandary, in need of income and seeking a new creative direction.
Living in a brown-shingle house at Dwight and Telegraph (rent $35 a month), she often sat in at the Blind Lemon, the pioneering storefront folk club Cahn launched on San Pablo Avenue (a building most recently inhabited by California Office Machines). It was there that she encountered banjo player Dick Oxtot, a leading figure in the East Bay’s thriving traditional jazz scene, who was impressed by her soulful renditions of country blues and spirituals. … Continue reading »
Dianne Reeves, a regal figure in jazz world, plays Berkeley
It’s been at least two generations since jazz stars took on aristocratic titles, otherwise Dianne Reeves would surely be known as The Queen. The gorgeous singer with an even more glorious voice is one of jazz’s most regal figures, an artist who embodies the music’s enduring values of elegance, class and improvisational poise (which isn’t to say that she can’t get earthy when the music requires a little grit).
She’s a performer with a gift for transforming any space she inhabits into her living room, where she spins evocative tails for her listeners. Over the years I’ve seen her tear the roof off little theaters and mesmerize the Hollywood Bowl, where she put together events for several years as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first head of jazz programming.
“Small, large, it doesn’t make a difference,” says Reeves, 55, who plays Friday at Zellerbach Hall for Cal Performances with her longtime pianist and music direcotr Peter Martin, bassist Reginald Veal, drummer Terreon Gully, and Brazilian guitar master Romero Lubambo. “No matter where you are, it’s all the same place when it comes to communicating with an audience.” … Continue reading »
It takes three to tango: Trio Garufa play Berkeley Friday
When Guillermo Garcia moved to the Bay Area in the mid-90s, he was an accomplished tango guitarist whose career path had left little time for performing. Born and raised in Argentina and trained as a sound engineer in Paris at the Pompidou Center’s cutting edge research arm IRCAM, he relocated to Berkeley in 1996 to take a job developing audio technology at the Gibson Guitar facility on 9th Street (a location that Gibson closed years ago).
On his first day on the job, Garcia surveyed the industrial-looking West Berkeley block and thought to himself, “I guess I’m not going to do any tango here.” On his way downstairs, however, he immediately discovered The Beat, a dance studio where Bay Area Tango Association founder and esteemed teacher Nora Dinzelbacher regularly offered classes. Garcia had stumbled upon the East Bay’s avid and active tango scene, and he’s been at the center of it ever since.
Trio Garufa, his ensemble with bassist Sascha Jacobsen and Swiss-born bandoneon player Adrian Jost, also a sound engineer, celebrates the release of its third album “El Rumor de tus Tangos” Friday at Ashkenaz, with an array of special guests. … Continue reading »
Marcel Khalifé: Defending causes with popular songs
Long before the Arab Spring upended the Middle East’s calcified political order, Marcel Khalifé threw down a musical gauntlet, challenging the forces of repression and reaction with his supremely sophisticated, wildly popular songs.
An evocative vocalist and master of the oud, the pear-shaped 11-string fretless Middle Eastern lute, Khalifé was finishing his studies at Beirut’s National Higher Conservatory of Music when civil war erupted in 1975. He sought succor in the flowing verse of celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, setting his poems to music.
Recording songs such as “Jawaz al-Safr” (Passport) and “Ummi” (My Mother), Khalifé combined aesthetic innovation with a genuinely populist sensibility. The music captured the imagination of huge swath of the Arab world, and Khalifé became a star transcending the region’s religious and national fissures. … Continue reading »
Berkeley sings, Jazzschool is hub that makes it happen
The word is out on the musicians’ grapevine. When it comes to vocals, the Jazzschool has become an invaluable forum for transmitting the tradition and presenting many of the most creative singers on the scene.
This weekend’s programming makes the case, with two rising stars from New York City offering concerts and workshops. Sachal Vasandani, a Chicago native who has quickly established himself as one of the most confident young male singers finding inspiration in jazz, performs Friday night and presents a vocal skills master class on Saturday afternoon.
With three releases on Mack Avenue since 2007, Vasandani has displayed a sharp ear for interesting material, a warm, deep-grained tone, and supple, relaxed phrasing at even the briskest tempos. He’s joined Friday by prodigious saxophonist Dayna Stephens, a Berkeley High grad who’s become a major force in New York City despite dealing with a life threatening medical condition. … Continue reading »
Musical Art Quintet: Blowing up the chamber music scene
Sascha Jacobsen wasn’t trying to foment a string insurrection. The conservatory-trained bassist just wanted to play some music. As a regular participant in Classical Revolution, the organization that launched a national movement of chamber music jam sessions from San Francisco’s Café Revolution in 2006, he and Sri Lankan-born violist Charith Premawardhana were looking for material. The only piece that fit the ensemble on hand, a string quartet plus double bass, was Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Opus 77. The group had a ball, and then looked around wondering what to play next. Jacobsen took matters into his own hands.
“I would work on something, print it out, and literally bring it down and throw it in front of whoever was there, and we’d sight read it,” Jacobsen recalls. “It wasn’t always successful. Some times we’d play a piece twice in a row to get it down. After a few months, I realized that we have a repertoire. I wasn’t trying to form a group, and it just worked out that way with the guys who had been there week after week.” … Continue reading »
Junius Courtney Big Band: 50 years of swinging
The Junius Courtney Big Band was born in Berkeley, and it’s entirely fitting that the irrepressibly swinging 19-piece ensemble kicks off a series of events celebrating its 50th anniversary with a dance party Friday at Freight & Salvage, a venue that has hosted the band regularly for the past decade.
While the band’s namesake founder, an ebullient trumpeter and vocalist, passed away in 2003, his son, drummer Nat Courtney, has kept the JCBB rolling, the most visible legacy of a family with deep Berkeley ties. Propelled by the dogged efforts of trombonist Pat Mullan, who spent many years working as a librarian in downtown branch of the Berkeley Public Library, the orchestra is built around a core of long-time members, including trumpeter and music director George Spencer and bassist Terry Hilliard, a Bay Area jazz stalwart who provided the clave groove on Cal Tjader’s Latin jazz classic “Soul Sauce.” Trumpeter Frank Fisher and pianist Roberta Mandel both started performing with Junius Courtney in the 1960s. … Continue reading »
In Berkeley: Zakir Hussain and the Masters of Percussion
No single concert can capture more than a small fraction of the music of India, a dizzying, multi-ethnic subcontinental nation that is home to one of the world’s oldest classical music traditions (not to mention polyglot pop scenes and numerous folk forms).
But Saturday’s Masters of Percussion concert at Zellerbach Hall features an extraordinary array of artists reflecting the striking contrasts and breathtaking creativity that make India such a vibrant cultural force. A mini-festival presented by Cal Performances, the event is the latest incarnation of a long-running cross-cultural showcase assembled by tabla master Zakir Hussain.
In past years, Hussain designed the evening as an extended encounter between the North Indian Hindustani and South Indian Carnatic traditions, but this season the focus has shifted. The concert still unfolds as a series of solos, duets, and ensemble jams, but rather than an internal Indian dialogue the concert features mostly Hindustani musicians with Uzbek frame drum expert Abbos Kosimov thrown in as a ringer. … Continue reading »
Out in Berkeley: Get your Irish on for St Patrick’s Day
With all the requisite ethnic politicking surrounding the fast approaching presidential election, the question of Barack Obama’s Irish-American coattails is once again salient. As the Dublin-born, Oakland-based singer Shay Black discovered with an acappella version of the Corrigan Brothers’ ditty “There’s No One as Irish as Barack Obama,” the urge to claim the half-Kenyan Hawaiian as a kinsman is potent indeed.
After the genealogy website ancestry.co.uk announced that Obama’s great great great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, was born in County Offaly, and sailed from Ireland to New York City in 1850, the Corrigan Brothers posted a video of their tongue-in-cheek tune on YouTube.
Black, who hails from Ireland’s preeminent musical family, revamped the song and recorded it as a sing-along at Berkeley’s Starry Plough. His 2008 YouTube video of the performance became an internet sensation, garnering more than 1.2 million hits, and possibly nudging the course of the campaign. … Continue reading »
