Celebratory start to Stern’s season
You won’t need platform shoes to get into the groove at this year’s Stern Grove Festival, where Kool & the Gang will reprise disco-era R&B classics to open the 80th installment of the venerable free summer concert series on June 25.
The rest of the Stern season won’t be announced until May, but the San Francisco outdoor festival is focusing on the opening-day bash, which includes the preshow Big Picnic Party. Tickets to that fundraiser, which start at $325, offer patrons reserved picnic-table seating for the concert and other amenities not available to the multitudes who pour into the meadow and plop down where they may.
In addition to the widely sampled 1973 hit “Jungle Boogie,” which director Quentin Tarantino used in “Pulp Fiction” and the Muppets covered, Kool & the Gang (which still features most of its key original members) undoubtedly will play its biggest hit, “Celebration,” the all-purpose 1980 anthem heard at weddings, football games, political conventions and bar mitzvahs.
The band’s founding saxophonist, Ronald Bell, who also goes by his Muslim name Khalis Bayyan, told Billboard the initial idea for the tune came from reading the Quran.
“I was reading the passage where God was creating Adam, and the angels were celebrating and singing praises,” he said. “That inspired me to write the basic chords and the line, ‘Everyone around the world, come on, let’s celebrate.’ ”
For more information, go to www.sterngrove.org
Nature inspires unorthodox music
Lisa Mezzacappa’s ongoing composition “Organelle” sets up structures for musical improvisation inspired by the patterns and passage of time in nature, the human body and the cosmos.
One of the movements was inspired by the 24-hour life span of the mayfly, which molts, mates, lays its eggs and expires in one day.
“It’s a series of one-minute cycles mimicking the life cycle of the mayfly, with its short moments of glory,” says Mezzacappa, the Berkeley bassist and composer, who adds a new section to the piece March 9 at the Exploratorium, with music based on the bay tides lapping at the museum’s pier.
She made the score of “Organelle’’ flexible enough so that different instrumentalists in various locales can approach it their way.
Trumpeter Darren Johnston and oboist/electronics player Kyle Bruckman were in the band that premiered the “Cambium” movement last fall at the Berkeley Art Museum.
“I have a soft spot for tree trunks, which grow a layer of cambium every year,” says the composer, alluding to the rings in the ancient redwoods at Muir Woods and the diagrams showing at what point in a tree’s life the Magna Carta was written.
“That’s a great visual way of understanding time passing in nature,” adds Mezzacappa, who creates graphic scores for the musicians to play her unorthodox pieces.
She’s making this new section with Exploratorium staff artist Wayne Grim, who created sonic software using a year’s worth of tide, temperature, turbidity and other data collected from the bay by Exploratorium scientists.
“It’s so cool what Wayne does,” says Mezzacappa, who will improvise on bass to Grim’s live “sonification,” and later conduct a grooving new percussion-quartet version of the full suite. “He writes these fantastic computer programs that translate that raw data into sound.”
Those sounds from Grim’s laptop, broadcast through the theater’s surround-sound speakers, vary in weight and texture, the composer notes. “Some have really pretty tones, very soft, sobbing tones,” she explains. “Others almost sound like radio frequency noise, which sound really good with the bow of the bass.”
So long, Mr. Coryell
We lost one of the great improvisers last week when guitarist Larry Coryell ,an effusive musician and one of the first to fuse jazz and rock, died in his sleep at 73. Equally fluent in the ways of Wes Montgomery and Jimi Hendrix, the blues, the Beatles and Indian music, Larry was a passionate player — and a sharp, funny, forthright man — who never held back.
“There was no artifice or B.S. when he spoke or played,” says Berkeley saxophonist George Brooks, who had the pleasure of working with Coryell over the past 20 years.
“Larry had many ups and downs in his life, from world fame at a young age, to a selfdestructive fall from grace, followed by a rebirth through sobriety, Buddhism and dedication to music,” Brooks continued. “I think this made him fearless onstage and able to take risks — always pushing to the edge, unafraid of making mistakes or revealing weakness.”
To hear Larry Coryell play “She’s Leaving Home,” by Lennon and McCartney, and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” on acoustic steel string guitar: youtu.be/NrdA5Asu4Ec