Musician brings improv to SoundBox
‘Eye, Sea You Are Hear’ shaping up as highlight of Symphony’s series
Mazz Swift has no intention of blindsiding the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony, but they’re in for a wild ride at the upcoming SoundBox concerts.
A violinist, vocalist and improvisation specialist well-versed in the art of shaping composition in real time via conduction, Swift is the guest curator for the Symphony’s experimental SoundBox series on Friday and Saturday, Dec. 8-9, in Davies Symphony Hall’s flexible backstage room outfitted with a state-of-the-art Meyer Sound system.
The New York musician, who uses they/them pronouns, designed a program called “Eye, Sea You Are Hear” for SoundBox, and it contains open stretches intended for the kind of spontaneous interaction and unscored music making that symphony musicians rarely face.
“I sent ahead some film of my conduction and some descriptions, and I’ll have a good amount of time to workshop with the Symphony beforehand, which is pretty unusual,” Swift told the Chronicle about their process. “I have five or six main hand signals I like to work with, so it’s not like there’s a broad range of gestures they need to learn.”
However deep the Symphony players get into Swift’s conduction system, Swift wanted to make sure there were musicians “who could improvise the way I wanted them to.” To that end, Swift is bringing along an illustrious posse of close collaborators, including Chicago musicians Clara Lyon on the violin, cellist Hannah Collins and East Bay percussionist Haruka Fujii, a bandmate of Swift’s in the Silkroad Ensemble, the East-meets-West project launched by famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
“I’ve been working with Hannah and Clara very closely, developing a language with the idea of writing a piece for them,” they explained, “so I pulled them in right away.”
San Francisco Symphony Artistic Administrator Gregory Hix, who programs the SoundBox concerts, has had his eye on Swift for several years. The Juilliard-trained violinist has cut a singular figure on the American music scene over the past two decades, combining a love of American roots music, Brazilian forró and Hungarian gypsy fiddling with a passion for devising electronic soundscapes.
With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise Swift has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists, from DJ Logic, rapper Kanye West and R&B singer D’Angelo to boundarypushing improvisers such as bassist William Parker, guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer and Butch Morris, their primary mentor in conduction.
For SoundBox, Hix suggested Swift work with Finnish-born New York visual artist Santtu Mustonen, who’s creating imagery for the production.
“Mazz is an artist who had been on our radar for some time,” Hix said, noting that the ideal SoundBox curators are “amazing performers with a unique point of view, but are also capable of looking holistically at an entire program to fully realize a complete vision for the evening.
“Mazz showed up to our first programming meeting full of ideas — for repertoire, visual artists and photographers they wanted to feature, new stage configurations, lighting ideas — and it was immediately clear this SoundBox program would be one of a kind.”
Swift hasn’t spent a lot of time on Bay Area stages, though their long-running duo with similarly expansive San Francisco violinist Alisa Rose has landed Swift some gigs at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Zoo Lab in Oakland.
San Francisco’s own Kronos Quartet recently commissioned two pieces from Swift, the first of which, “She Is a Story, Herself,” premiered last year at Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont (and was written in honor of longtime Stanford faculty member Andrea Lunsford).
But the highest-profile project was last month’s run of Bay Area performances with the Silkroad Ensemble’s “American Railroad” production. Swift joined the group in 2017 and was at the center of its reimagining as Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops fiddler, banjo player and vocalist Rhiannon Giddens took over the helm in 2020.
“The funny thing is Rhiannon and I have been circling around each other for 20 years,” Swift said. “We ended up at the same conferences and festivals working similar territory, reminding people about the history of Black fiddle music and the role that Black Americans played in creating this music. We’d always say, ‘We should work together or something,’ but were so busy doing our own things it never happened. When she was up for Silkroad artistic director, I was the first person she called.”
For “Eye, Sea You Are Hear,” Swift has pulled together a disparate program starting with some solo improvised pieces for vocals, violin and electronics, and new string trio works designed for Lyon and Collins. There’s the West Coast premiere of a piece by Boston violist Philip Rawlinson, whom Swift has been mentoring, and several pieces by Fujii.
“I figured it was a great opportunity for us to work together to do something outside of Silkroad,” Swift said of collaborating with Fujii. “I love the idea of featuring her and some other percussionists. We’re also doing some pieces by Gabriela Lena Frank. It’s kind of a hodgepodge that seems loosely related, but it will all come together.”