Kronos paired with musical saw
David Coulter, the idiosyncratic British multi-instrumentalist and composer whose associates include the Kronos Quartet, Tom Waits, Yoko Ono and the novelist Khaled Hosseini, was riding the Paris Métro decades ago when a strange, beautiful sound wafted his way.
“It was this incredible, otherworldly sound. Not a whistle, not a voice,” recalls Coulter, who followed it to its source. “It was a blind guy sitting on little stool, with a dog at his feet, playing a bowed saw.”
That’s one of the instruments Coulter mastered and plans to play as artist-in-residence at Kronos Festival 2018, the Kronos Quartet’s annual hometown music bash, which revels in the culture-crossing collaboration the group thrives on. It runs April 26-28 at SFJazz Center.
Now living in the Bay Area, Coulter, who created the music for American Conservatory Theater’s hit 2017 adaption of Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” first collaborated with Kronos in 1994, playing didgeridoo on a piece Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe wrote for string quartet and the long wooden indigenous Australian wind instrument.
They most recently joined forces last year on a virtual reality 3-D film based on Hosseini’s forthcoming book “Sea Prayer,” scored by Bay Areabased Iranian composer Sahba Aminikia, who’s also featured at the festival.
Aminikia arranged an excerpt from Coulter’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns” score to be performed by the quartet and with the improvising saw whiz. And he’ll play keyboards when he, Coulter, the electric guitar-percussion duo Living Earth Show and the electronic sound artist called Bran(…) pos make some spontaneous music together.
Collaborating with Kronos “is an indescribable pleasure,” says Coulter, a voluble chap who once described himself as “self-taught musical adventurer who specializes in weird.” He played mandolin, violin, ukulele and percussion in the Celtic punk band the Pogues in the early ’90s, and knows his way around the Jew’s harp and theremin, too.
“The really beautiful thing about Kronos, and what the Kronos Festival does, is that it precipitates these really fantastic collisions of cultures and musical backgrounds,” he says. “The commonality that threads through the whole thing, of course, is that we’re all just telling our stories through our instruments.”
Coulter and Kronos plan to play “Lament for Charleston” by the late saxophonist Ralph Carney, created in response to the 2015 murder of nine African Americans at a Charleston church. Carney was thinking of “Alabama,” John Coltrane’s potent elegy for the four girls killed in the infamous 1966 KKK bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham.
A close friend of Carney’s, Coulter broke down crying when he heard “Lament for Charleston” — “he managed to voice the anger and pain and injustice,” Coulter says — and sent it to Kronos’ David Harrington. Similarly moved, he commissioned an arrangement for Kronos, who performed the piece with Carney on bass saxophone at the 2015 Cabrillo Music Festival.
“I’ve got to find a way of channeling Ralph through the saw,” Coulter says.
For more information, go to www.kronosquartet.org.
Merola presents
The rising singers chosen for this year’s prestigious Merola Opera program — from as far away as Wenzhou, China, and as close as California’s El Dorado Hills — will get to shine at concerts and opera performances during Merola’s 2018 Summer Festival from July 5-Aug. 18.
The vocalists are scheduled to perform staged operatic excerpts July 5 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and on July 7 at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall. Full-blown productions at the Conservatory — of Mozart’s early “Il re pastore (the Shepherd King),” July 19 and 20, Stravinsky’s “The Rake Progress” Aug. 2 and 4 — are capped by the Merola Grande Finale concert Aug. 18 at the Opera House.
For more information, go to www.merola.org.
Enjoy the outdoors at Yerba Buena fest
The Yerba Buena Gardens Festival brings a typically eclectic mix of talent to the urban glade for 100 free shows between May 6 and Oct. 28, opening with Mariachi Flor de Toloache, billed as the first all-female mariachi band, on a program with local singersongwriter Diana Gameros.
Season highlights include performances by Cuban jazz saxophonist and percussionist Yosvany Terry’s sextet, Manila Disco Fever and Marcus Shelby’s orchestra playing his “Blackball: The Negro League and the Blues.”
For more information, go to www.ybgfestival.org.
ACT grant for kids
American Conservatory Theater has received a fiveyear, $750,000 grant from the San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families for its ACTsmart Intensive Residencies, which provide arts and theater education to school children in lowincome communities.
For more information, go to visit www.act-sf.org/education.
Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area journalist and former San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.