Galaxy of sounds with celestial art
Zeena Parkins produces all kinds of sounds on the electric harps that she invented and equipped with a whammy bar, ebony fretboard and electronic processing devices. She plucks, drums, scrapes and otherwise plays the instrument to make improvised music that pops and whirs, echoes, hums and rumbles.
Parkins, an avant-gardist whose associates include Björk, Nels Cline, John Zorn and Merce Cunningham’s dance company, doesn’t know yet how she and ace percussionist William Winant will approach the graphic-score drawings by Jay Heikes that will launch their improvised duets on Saturday, April 28, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where a show of Heikes’ work closes the next day.
The exhibition includes two of the Minneapolis artist’s elegant “Music for Minor Planets” drawings on music manuscript paper, made with a pencil rake Heikes devised to create the multilined forms that swoop, peak and tangle across a musical staff dotted with moon and planet shapes.
“We’re going to react to them and improvise,” says Parkins, a classically trained pianist from Detroit who found her métier in Manhattan’s Lower East Side experimental music scene in the 1980s, when she electrified her harp to be heard amid the din of guitars and drums and other instruments. She’s taught in the famously forward-looking music department at Oakland’s Mills College for nine years.
Parkins and Winant, who’ve performed together often, don’t plan to prepare much in advance, other than to decide which and how many of Heikes’ “Music for Minor Planets” drawings they’ll play off.
The orchestration they choose for each drawing might itself be “a point of entry” into the music, says Parkins, who plans to play acoustic harp, use some electronic processing, and place objects like bolts and balls on the harp “to alter the sound. Willie will be using small percussion and vibes and timpani. The palette is quite wide.”
Parkins has not met Heikes or talked to him about the drawings but expects to do both after Saturday’s performance.
The drawings are beautiful, she says, and “I wonder if he had sounds in mind when he was making them. Was he thinking sonically or just about the image? From the player’s standpoint, they’re very evocative, with lots of information that’s going to be very useful for a sonic interpretation of the images.
“You kind of take everything in — ‘Where is the image on the page? How dense or how transparent it is? Is it an autonomous shape or connected to other images?’ ” Parkins adds. “I’m excited to see what Willie and I will come up with.”
For more information, go to https://bampfa.org.
If so and such
San Jose Jazz has booked the “Jazz Beyond” talent for a new art and technology festival called “If So, What?,” which runs Thursday-Sunday, April 26-29, at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. It promises immersive multimedia and augmented reality installations, panels with pros, and performances by artists like the Brooklyn house music band Tortured Soul, soul-singing songwriter Rayana Jay from Richmond and solid South Bay DJs like Sake One and SheaButter. For more information, go to www.ifsowhat.com.
Stanford Live
Stanford Live’s bountiful 2018-19 season includes performances by Meredith Monk, Kronos Quartet, Esa-Pekka Salonen with the London Philharmonia Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, his brother Branford with his own quartet, Frederica von Stade singing a holiday program with the Sonos Handbell Ensemble, Dianne Reeves singing tunes from her Christmas album.
The season opens Sept. 21 with the venerable jazz tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd playing an 80th birthday concert with the Marvels — not the Jamaican doo-woppers of the 1960s and ’70s, but a band with guitarist Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz on pedal steel — and singer Lucinda Williams.
On Nov. 7, cellist Maya Beiser and the Ambient Orchestra perform a version of David Bowie’s final album, “Blackstar,” arranged by Evan Ziporyn and Jamshied Sharifi.
For the full schedule, go to https://live.stanford.edu.
Playhouse lineup
Christopher Chen’s “You Mean to Do Me Harm” opens San Francisco Playhouse’s six-play 2018-19 season Sept. 18, commissioned and developed by the Playhouse and directed by artistic chief Bill English. It’s billed as “a psychological exploration of Chinese and American foreign relations, and of the personal relations we hold most dear,” set off by an innocuous remark at a dinner with two interracial couples that “leads to a surreal escalation of Cold War-style paranoia.”
For the full season, go to www.sfplayhouse.org.
Jazz at Jax
Jazz at the Ballroom, the nonprofit that puts on concerts in Bing Crosby’s former Hillsborough manse, is working with JAX Vineyards and Airbnb to present monthly jazz shows at Jax Tasting Room on Brannan Street in San Francisco. The 30-year-old Italian guitarist Pasquale Grasso, whom Pat Metheny called the most significant new voice on the instrument he’s heard in years, opens the series May 5.
For more information, go to www.jazzattheballroom.com.