S.F. teen turning heads
Composer and singer off to college in Boston after series of concerts
What makes an artist a prodigy? In the case of San Francisco singer, pianist, guitarist and composer Joshua Tazman, it’s not so much that he’s creating music that’s sophisticated far beyond his years. Rather, the 18-year-old writes songs that capture his numinous present, a feat of self-reflection startling in its maturity.
Heading off to Boston in the fall for a joint degree program at New England Conservatory and Tufts University, Tazman is set to make a lasting impression as he departs with a series of concerts, playing the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley on Saturday, July 22, and the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco on Aug. 18. At the California Jazz Conservatory he’s premiering “The Leaving Suite,” a jazzlaced song cycle about childhood receding and all of the next chapter’s attendant doubts, angst and excitement.
“The idea came to me a few months ago while waiting for a train,” Tazman said in an interview last month speaking by Skype from Montreal, where he was on tour with the Monterey Jazz Festival’s all-star Next Generation Orchestra. “Birds flew down from the highway in a wave as the train was pulling in, and that image stuck with me.”
That’s not to say that Tazman always uses music as a diary to reflect directly on his own experiences. At the Red Poppy, he’s premiering a second suite inspired by the verse of Jack Spicer, particularly the Berkeley Renaissance writer’s groundbreaking 1957 book of serial poems “After Lorca.”
Increasingly intrigued by classical music, he studied with the San Francisco Conservatory’s Daniel Wood and ended up setting seven Spicer poems into a song cycle arranged for jazz rhythm section and string quartet.
Drawn to Spicer’s vivid imagery, raw emotion and narrative playfulness, Tazman said “his work has this fairy-tale quality, combined with a very tortured, lonely undercurrent. That dichotomy really intrigued me. He had this philosophy that his poetry was dictated to him by outside forces. I almost felt like I was letting his work speak to me in adapting it to music.”
A graduate of San Mateo’s Nueva High School, Tazman makes his debut at the Monterey Jazz Festival Sept. 16, playing material from both suites with his own band, a coveted spot that he earned by winning the Next Generation Festival’s vocal soloist competition in April.
The following afternoon he performs with the Paul Contosdirected Next Generation Orchestra, including a luscious arrangement of Jobim’s “The Song of the Sabiá” by Next Gen trumpeter Kate Williams. Contos, who also worked closely with Tazman as director of the SFJazz High School All-Stars, hails his “poise, elegance and jazz virtuosity” on a tour de force ballad arrangement of “More Than You Know,” and an uptempo romp through “The Song Is You.”
Some prodigies seem to invent themselves out of whole cloth, but Tazman has taken full advantage of the Bay Area’s wealth of musical resources, even beyond Monterey and SFJazz. As the only vocalist in an advanced bebop workshop directed by saxophonist Mike Zilber, he sang wordless lines and improvised with the horns at the California Jazz Conservatory.
The conservatory is also where he found his primary jazz vocal mentor two years ago while attending a master class taught by the brilliant Theo Bleckmann. Laurie Antonioli, a veteran jazz singer who directs the conservatory’s jazz vocal program, was so struck by Tazman’s talent that she took him under her wing.
“He’s an extraordinary musician and composer whose instrument happens to be his voice,” she said. “The thing that stands out the most, aside from that he’s a prodigy, is his attention to detail. I had mentioned six months ago that he should try to hook up with classical composers and listen to string quartets. Next thing you know, he’s written a seven-movement string quartet, a through-composed piece using poetry. Get out of town!”
For Tazman, music has long provided succor and comfort. He started writing songs to help navigate the difficulties of middle school, and his music has continued to “gravitated toward coming-of-age themes,” he says. “The essence of music for me is connecting to a force that’s bigger than yourself, connecting with people, and that connection is a source of solace. The role of art is to communicate across the divide.”
Out of the mouths of babes.