Sax and sarode in Sunday best
When saxophonist George Brooks preps for a performance with sarode player Alam Khan, he woodsheds on alto, which blends better with the Indian string instrument than the tenor saxophone. He also immerses himself in the music of Khan’s late father, the revered sarodist, composer and teacher Ali Akbar Khan.
“It’s about as deep as it gets,” says Brooks, who never got to play with the elder Khan but has worked with other great Indian artists like flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia and the Bay Area’s tabla wizard Zakir Hussain, as well as blues, jazz and classical musicians as varied as Albert Collins, Terry Riley, Etta James, Larry Coryell and Kronos Quartet.
The Berkeley saxophonist-composer plans to get into Ali Akbar Khan’s music, and some things Brooks composed with Alam, at the duo’s Feb. 10 date at San Francisco’s landmark Swedenborgian Church. Joining them will be the young tabla player Nilan Chaudhuri, son of the Bay Area’s other tabla master, Swapan Chaudhuri.
Nilan and Alam grew up in Marin, where the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael became a magnet for many artists, and where these young Indian American musicians soaked up all kinds of sounds.
That’s a plus for Brooks, who played blues and jazz and studied saxophone at the New England Conservatory before going to India, where he plunged into North Indian music with the great vocalist Pandit Pran Nath.
Playing with people “who understand the Western perspective as well as the Indian classical perspective is really helpful for me,” Brooks says. “I wasn’t born into their tradition. I’m some kind of hybrid American musician, deeply influenced by Indian classical music and Indian classical musicians.”
The performance kicks off the 2019 Second Sunday Concert Series at the lovely Swedenborgian Church on Lyon Street, an 1895 Arts and Crafts gem designed and decorated by a distinguished group of Northern California artists that included architects Bernard Maybeck and Arthur Brown and painter William Keith.
The series, which benefits three local groups — Young Women’s Choral Projects, Canine Companions and Nature in the City — features Fire & Grace on March 10 and Paul McCandless’ Charged Particles trio on April 14.
Brooks has never been inside the historic church, but his friend mandolinist Mike Marshall told him it was a sweet space with good acoustics. The trio plans to play raga-based material, says the saxophonist, including “ragas that incorporate the feeling of the blues,” which comes naturally to most saxophone players.
“We’re trying to invoke that spirit of collaboration that Ali Akbar Khan was interested in,” says Brooks, who produced the excellent 2018 CD “The Alchemy” by Elements, his trio with the thrilling Indian violinist and singer Kala Ramnath and virtuoso Dutch harpist Gwyneth Wentink.
“He set up his school in the West for a reason,” Brooks says. “We’re trying to water that plant.” For more information, go to https://sfswedenborgian.org.
Images of internment
“Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties” includes potent photographs of American families being rounded up in California in 1942 by U.S. troops, held temporarily in racetracks like Santa Anita — where they lived in old horse stalls — and imprisoned in desolate outposts like Manzanar.
There are images by celebrated photographers like Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, incarcerated artists like Toyo Miyatake and Miné Okubo, and striking pictures by the late Chronicle photographer Clem Albers. One of them shows children caged in the back of a truck in San Pedro.
Presented by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation with the National Japanese American Historical Society and J-Sei, the exhibition focuses on a dark period that organizers say “draws parallels to tactics chillingly resurgent today.”
The photos are on view Thursday, Jan. 18, through May 27 at Futures Without Violence in San Francisco’s Presidio.
For more information, go to https://thentheycame.org.
Double piano
Other Minds presents pianists Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies on Feb. 10 at San Francisco’s Taube Atrium Theater in the West Coast premiere of Shostakovich’s 1936 two-piano arrangement of his Symphony No. 4. They also plan to play Shostakovich’s double-piano version of Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”
For more information, go to www.otherminds.org Two Assads.
Another smashing duo, Brazilian-born guitarists Sérgio and Odair Assad, are booked on a San Francisco Performances bill for Feb. 9 at Herbst Theatre. The program includes music by Albeniz, Piazzolla, Jobim and Sérgio Assad.
For more information, go to https://sfperformances.org.