Tuck & Patti on tour with niece St. Vincent
Tuck Andress and Patti Cathcart, the great guitar-vocal duo known as Tuck & Patti who celebrated 40 years in the jazz business and their 37th wedding anniversary this year, are used to taking care of all aspects of their career themselves, from crafting songs to booking hotel rooms.
So it was a fun change for them to go on tour this year with Andress’ niece, Annie Clark, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter known as St. Vincent. Clark had the improvisational duo open the shows on her “Fear The Future” tour and took care of all the travel and other arrangements.
“We had our own bedroom on the tour bus,” Cathcart recalls, with a laugh. “It was a ball. We met all these young people who started calling us Auntie Patti and Uncle Tuck.”
“The audiences started calling us that,” adds Andress, whose creative way of mixing melody, bass and harmony inspired younger guitarists like Charlie Hunter and provides the perfect counterpart to his wife’s sumptuous voice and spontaneity. “It was very sweet.”
Years before, they had taken then-teenage Clark on tour with them to Europe and Russia, showing her the ropes. Now she’s producing her uncle and aunt’s forthcoming children’s record, songs from which Tuck & Patti plan to perform at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Friday, Nov. 23, along with whatever tunes from their expansive repertoire crop up.
The yet-to-be-named album, which they’re mixing in their Menlo Park home studio, was recorded over two intense days at Clark’s Los Angeles studio. The night before, Cathcart and her niece got to talking and decided to drop the songs they had planned, replacing them with a whole new set including Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut,” “Love Song” by the Cure, Devo’s “Whip It,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” and the Beach Boys’ “In My Room.”
“Patti and Annie thought, ‘Let’s not do any traditional children’s songs,’ ” says Andress. “We started brainstorming and came up with songs that maybe parents would like as much as the kids and wouldn’t get sick of.”
Little kids love “True Colors” and often request it, notes Cathcart, who plans to take requests from the crowd at this post-Thanksgiving gig. With a repertoire that ranges from Duke Ellington to Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles and their own tunes, Tuck & Patti like to wing it.
“We’re improvising all the time. People will call out songs,” Cathcart says.
“There’s no set list in advance,” adds Andress, deadpan. “I can say that from painful personal experience. I never know. Nobody knows except maybe Patti, and she doesn’t tell.”
For more information, go to www.thefreight.org.
Yuletide singing
The celebrated San Francisco men’s chorus Chanticleer is booked for its annual “A Chanticleer Christmas” in churches and cathedrals around the Bay Area from Dec. 11 to 23, including St. Ignatius in San Francisco, Oakland’s Cathedral of Christ the Light, the Carmel Mission and Mission Santa Clara.
The program ranges from candlelit Gregorian chant to music by Palestrina, Poulenc and Rachmaninoff, carols in Spanish and English, and the premiere of American composer Peter Bloesch’s “Behold, a Simple, Tender Babe.”
For more information, go to www.chanticleer.org.
Kung Pao Kosher
Carol Leifer, the comedian best known for her brilliant writing for “Seinfeld” and as the prime inspiration for the character Elaine, headlines San Francisco’s 26th annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show scheduled for Dec. 23, 24 and 25 at the New Asia Restaurant on Pacific Avenue.
Billed as “Jewish comedy on Christmas in a Chinese restaurant (where else?),” this year’s show also features Vietnamese Jewish performer Joseph Nguyen, sardonic New York comic Jordon Ferber and Kung Pao founding producer Lisa Geduldig.
For more information, go to www.koshercomedy.com.
Other Minds
The venerable Northern California composer Terry Riley opens Other Minds’ 2018-19 season at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum on Dec. 5, playing his piano music, solo and in tandem with pianist Gloria Cheng.
Cheng commissioned and recorded Riley’s “The Heaven Ladder, Book VII” in the 1990s and plans to reprise it at Yerba Buena. The improvising Riley is set to play two solo works written in memory of mentors — “Requiem for Wally,” for ragtime pianist Wally Rose, and “Simply M,” for Margaret Lyon, who chaired the Mills College music department — and join Cheng for the new four-hander he wrote for them, “Cheng Tiger Growl Roar.”
For more information, go to www.otherminds.org.
Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area journalist and former San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.