One more time for protest suite
Percussionist and composer Anthony Brown premiered his version of drummer Max Roach ’s“We Insist! Freedom Now Suite ” a few months before the 2016 election, 56 years after Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. wrote the fiercely beautiful protest suite calling for justice and equality for all people.
That pivotal piece, which Roach recorded with a group featuring vocalist Abbey Lincoln, tenor saxophone giant Coleman Hawkins and the Nigerian percussionist Olatunji, couldn’t be more relevant to our political moment, says Brown. Now he plans to reprise his “reimagining” of the work at Herbst Theatre on Sept. 24 as part of the 10th annual SF Music Day celebration, showcasing 35 diverse local ensembles on four stages around the Veterans Building.
“Look at the failure of our government just since the election to address the socioeconomic and racial injustices in this country. It’s getting worse every day,” says Anthony Brown, a Berkeley musician and scholar who is of African, Choctaw and Japanese ancestry. “As artists of conscience we have to speak up.”
Brown, whose Asian American Orchestra, joined by poet Genny Lim and a
bata drum ensemble, performed his version of Roach’s potent work at last year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival, will do it again with Lim and a nonet of players and singers. He calls Roach’s recording “the first full LP dedicated to the struggle for international freedom,” with songs referencing slavery and the 1960 massacre of black protesters in South Africa.
“I didn’t alter much of the original blueprint,” says Brown, a Cal-trained ethnomusicologist who dug into the Library of Congress’ Max Roach Collection, where among other things he found letters Maya Angelou wrote promoting the suite.
Brown, who once collaborated with Roach, changed a few grooves and added a contemplative new ending colored with Asian gongs and shakuhachi flute, “but if Max heard it, he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s my music.’ ”
This year’s SF Music Day, put on by InterMusic SF, was curated by executive director Cory Combs with input from Brown, composer Paul Dresher and violinist Tom Stone. The artists they chose include the Alexander String Quartet, Indo-jazz saxophonist George Brooks, harpist Anna Maria Mendieta and Tango del Cielo and the Klaxon Mutant Allstars.
For more information, go to www.intermusicsf.org.
Filipino film festival
Documentary filmmaker Ramona Diaz will be honored with a retrospective at the first Cinematografo Film Festival and Industry Forum, which takes place Nov. 9-12 at San Francisco’s AMC Kabuki 8 theater and aims to “elevate emerging and established Filipino American and Filipino talent, films and television content to the world stage.”
Diaz’s newest film, “Motherland,” a cinema verite portrait of the world’s busiest maternity hospital, Manila’s Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital, will be screened. Diaz’s earlier works, like “Imelda,” a 2014 documentary about the infamous former first lady of the Philippines, and 2012’s “Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey,” about Filipino rock singer Arnel Pineda tapped to sing with Journey after the band’s Neal Schon heard him on YouTube, will also be shown at the event.
Sponsored by the Filipino media and entertainment company ABS-CBN, the festival will announce and screen new movies by filmmakers such as H.P. Mendoza, Loy Arcenas and Marty Syjuco. The festival takes its name, Cinematografo, from the Philippines’ first movie house, which opened in 1897.
For more information, go to www.cinematografofilmfestival.com.
Panis honored
Speaking of Filipino culture, Alleluia Panis, cofounder and artistic director of the Bay Area’s Kulintang Arts and an activist who helped create San Francisco’s South of Market Pilipinas Cultural District, will be given the San Francisco Arts Commission’s first Artistic Legacy Grant at the commission’s annual grants convening at Herbst Theatre on Sept. 26. The grant pays $40,000.
There will also be a performance in her honor.
For more information, go to www.sfartscommission.org.
Lost horn
Perhaps you heard that the sterling New Orleans alto saxophonist Donald Harrison left his custom-made horn in a cab or hotel lobby while in San Francisco on Aug. 12 to play the Boom Boom Room. As of last week, the International Woodwind Co. saxophone, in a form-fitting case emblazoned with stickers from the New Orleans Saints and the Playboy Jazz Festival, hadn’t been found, despite calls from Harrison and his wife to local pawn shops and music stores and efforts by the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance.
Harrison hopes the horn, which he saved when Hurricane Katrina hit his house, will turn up before he returns to play Yoshi’s in Oakland on Wednesday, Aug. 30.
“It’s become like part of my body,” he says.
For information, go to www.facebook.com/public/Donald-Harrison.