Women’s History Month ushers in great sounds
Maestras series features concerts by some of the area’s top artists
A funny thing happened last year when the venerable Berkeley music and dance venue Ashkenaz assembled a roster of ostentatiously talented acts for Women’s History Month. The club wanted to present the women in a series billed as Masters, “and very few were comfortable being called master musicians,” says Brandi Brandes, Ashkenaz’s executive director.
Working with curator Carolyn Brandy, a pioneering percussionist who’s been blazing a path for women drummers for some four decades (and is unfazed by being described as a master), Brandes solved the dilemma by dubbing the series Maestras, Spanish for teachers. This year they’ve come up with another stellar month of Maestras programming.
Rather than musing on the differences between men and women in embracing an earned honorific, let’s take the series as intended. “Here are some incredible musicians who might not always get the recognition they deserve,” Brandes says.
The series kicks off Friday with a Women’s Jam and fundraiser for the Maestras series hosted by guitarist Shelley Doty, bassist Angeline Saris and drummer Denise Martin. On Saturday, Jackeline Rago’s Venezuelan jazz project VNote Ensemble with flutist Donna Viscuso, bassist Dan Feiszli and percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz plays a dance concert with special guests, including Venezuelan-born vocalist Anna-Maria Violich and trombonist Mara Fox. A virtuoso on the diminutive four-string cuatro, Venezuela’s national instrument, Rago, like many of the women featured in the series, is known as both a master and an inspired educator.
Somehow, I don’t think other women at the center of Maestras this year would shy away from being described as masters. On March 9, vocalist-percussionist Bobi Céspedes, the Bay Area’s essential conduit for Afro-Cuban culture, returns to Ashkenaz with her band. And on March 17 a powerhouse double bill pairs two duos, with East Bay jazz and blues great Faye Carol and pianist Joe Warner, and soul-steeped singer Linda Tillery with pianist Tammy Hall, the accompanist of choice for many of the region’s finest jazz vocalists.
The March Maestras series concludes with two fundraisers for Women Drummers International, the nonprofit arts organization Brandy founded to imbue women and girls with musical, cultural and healing experiences via drumming. A March 24 concert by Daughters of the Drum features internationally touring Bay Area world-jazz singer Amikaeyla and Susu Pampanin and Spirit of Sultana, a women’s percussion ensemble focused on percussion, songs and dance from across North Africa. And on March 31, the WestAfrican-inspired troupe Sistahs of the Drum performs on a double bill with Congolese-born drummer
and choreographer Mabiba Baegne with Los Angelesbased Panamanian-born percussionist Nikki Campbell as special guest.
Ashkenaz isn’t the only venue showcasing the Bay Area’s deep bench of groundbreaking women musicians. The California Jazz Conservatory (cjc. edu) celebrates the opening of its new Fiddler Annex (across the street from its main downtown Berkeley campus) with a talent-packed run of shows, including the Montclair Women’s Big Band tonight, vocalist Laurie Antonioli and the American Dreams Band with special guest Theo Bleckmann on Friday, and Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir on Saturday.
Saxophonist Jean Fineberg, who co-leads the Montclair big band, debuts a new female-centric octet Jazzphoria on March 9, and on March 23 she and trumpeter Ellen Seeling, her Montclair partner, present a free concert marking the end of the weeklong Women’s Jazz & Blues Camp, an intensive program of ensembles and classes in jazz, blues, Latin styles, improvisation, percussion techniques and jazz history.
SFJazz (www.sfjazz.org) marks Women’s History Month with a handful of exciting concerts, starting March 9 with Oakland harpist-vocalist Destiny Muhammad’s “Celtic to Alice Coltrane” program in the Joe Henderson Lab. San Francisco-reared trombonist-vocalist Natalie Cressman follows on March 10 with her Brooklyn band. And she joins SFJazz’s director of education Rebeca Mauleón for a program
on the late trombonist, arranger and NEA Jazz Master Melba Liston on March 14, as the first concert in the Koret Discover Jazz Series on “The Great Jazz Women.”
Mauleón also will be on hand as part of the all-female faculty at the fourth Annual SFJazz Girls Day on March 17, a daylong session for female jazz instrumentalists and vocalists ages 13-18, with worldclass musicians including pianist Tammy Hall, bassist Ruth Davies, saxophonist Kristen Strom, trombonist Mara Fox, trumpeter Kate Williams, drummer Ruthie Price and vocalist Tiffany Austin.
Another highlight is Berkeley pianist Laura Klein’s show at Piedmont Piano (www.piedmontpiano.com) on March 16. Featuring her trio with bassist Ruth Davies and drummer Kelly Fasman, with special guest Mary Fettig on reeds, the concert marks Marian McPartland’s 100th birthday. As a rising young player on the Bay Area scene, Fettig recorded with McPartland on her 1979 album “At the Festival” (Concord Jazz), and Klein plans on performing some of the tunes from that session as well as McPartland originals. It’s a lovely and fitting tribute to great jazz artist who never hesitated to boost fellow women players.