The Bay Area’s Martin Luther McCoy plays the SFJazz summer festival.
Otis Redding knew that the Monterey International Pop Music Festival wasn’t just another gig.
He’d spent the spring touring in Europe backed by the Stax house band, Booker T & the MG’s, recalibrating his act to draw in audiences unfamiliar with the call-and-response cadences of the R&B revues where he’d honed his passionately imploring sound. When he hit that stage in 1967 around 1 a.m., a set immortalized by D.A. Pennebaker in the documentary “Monterey Pop,” Redding transformed the uninitiated white audience into a fervid congregation with his embracing vision of soul.
Fifty years later, no Bay Area artist is better equipped to step into Redding’s pulpit than San Francisco-reared guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Martin Luther McCoy, an artist who shares similar roots in the African American church. Paying tribute to Redding, who died in a plane crash at the age of 26 just months after his Monterey Pop triumph, Martin Luther and the Black Sugar Ensemble is slated to play two shows Saturday, June 10 at the SFJazz Center’s Joe Henderson Lab as part of the 35th annual San Francisco Jazz Festival.
For McCoy, the point isn’t evoking Redding’s sound as much as his spirit.
“I get off on the story of the life lived as much as the music, though Otis’ music has been a gateway, where he really goes there at the end of every song,” McCoy says. “I can’t recreate that, but I can pay homage to it.”
If the musical bridge McCoy has built is grounded in the same sacred soil as Redding’s, he’s traversed a decidedly 21st century river of grooves via his seminal collaborations with the Roots and neo-soul star Cody Chesnutt. He intersected with the legacy of another artist who broke through at Monterey Pop when director Julie Taymor cast him as a Jimi Hendrix-inspired character delivering a searing version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in her 2007 Beatles-guided film “Across the Universe.”
Part of what sets McCoy apart is his long view of African American music, encompassing blues and gospel, R&B and soul, jazz, funk and hip-hop. It’s no accident that the Black Sugar Ensemble features versatile players like powerhouse jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley and R&B keyboardist Sundra Manning, a key member of singer Ledisi’s band Anibade during her formative Bay Area years. He describes Black Sugar as “a workshop of soul music. We’re here to deconstruct the tradition. You can play these songs over and over again, and it’s all about what can we do to them.”
The Black Sugar Ensemble will be joined by several special guests like multi-instrumentalist, producer and rapper Kev Choice. He and McCoy have worked on each other’s projects over the past decade, including the brilliant and undersung 2012 McCoy album “Love Is the Hero.” Like McCoy, Choice is versed in a vast continuum of black music, and he sees their shared experience in historically black colleges and universities (McCoy graduated from Morehouse College and Choice from Xavier University of Louisiana) as central to their musical identities.
“We both have that respect for the culture and history,” says Choice, who presents a set of new