Disney meets jazz
`100 Years of Disney Songs' sweeps into San Francisco
It's no exaggeration to say that the Disney empire was born with a song.
When Walt Disney released his breakthrough film, the
1928 short “Steamboat Willie,” he didn't just introduced what would one of the world's most popular cartoon characters in Mickey Mouse. He also pioneered synchronized sound in animation with a soundtrack that included the songs “Steamboat Bill” and “Turkey in the Straw.”
Given dozens of other options, Kim Nalley and Sasha Dobson probably won't be singing “Steamboat Bill” at the SFJAZZ Center on Saturday, “When You Wish Upon a Star — A Jazz Tribute to 100 Years of Disney” makes its only San Francisco stop. But with a program that spans nine decades the project highlights the way that songwriting has played a central role in the Disney
brand from the beginning.
Performed by the newly created house band of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the production is not affiliated with, sponsored, or authorized by the Walt Disney Company. The young New York-based quintet is led by pianist Sean Mason, a rising star who's been touring with the great jazz
singer Catherine Russell.
For vocalists, the Museum recruited two artists who both have deep Bay Area ties. Santa Cruz-reared Sasha Dobson hails from an illustrious Bay Area jazz clan that includes her late father, pianist Smith Dobson, her mother, vocalist Gail Dobson, and younger brother, multi-instrumentalist Smith Dobson V.
While jazz stars such as Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck and Sun Ra all recorded albums dedicated to Disney standards, Dobson absorbed the songs “not from Miles Davis but from the movies,” she said in a recent phone call from her Brooklyn apartment. “I was obsessed with `Cinderella,' `Snow White' and `Mary
Poppins.' The music from these movies I watched as a very little person is still in there.”
Dobson was reared on jazz, but she's carved out a New
York niche as a guitar playing singer-songwriter via half a dozen solo albums and the Americana-inflected trio Puss N Boots with Catherine Popper and Norah Jones (yes, that Norah Jones). In something of a musical homecoming, she released her first straight-ahead jazz project in 2021, “Girl Talk,” featuring guitar maestro Peter Bernstein.
Dobson's lithe, insinuating sound provides a conspicuous contrast to the blues-steeped Nalley, who's been a definitive Bay Area jazz artist for