Two jazz shows press case for social justice
Stanford and SFJazz host concerts tonight calling for racial and gender equality
From Louis Armstrong’s 1929 recording of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” and the clarion 1960 project “We Insist! (Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite)” through pianist Glenn Horiuchi’s 1989 album “Manzanar Voices,” jazz has long been in the vanguard of the struggle for freedom and racial justice.
A rising generation of musicians has taken that legacy to heart, creating new works that speak to the urgent concerns behind movements like Black Lives Matter. Two concerts on Thursday, one a double bill in San Francisco and the other at Stanford’s Bing Hall, feature some of the most thoughtful and accomplished musicians seeking to infuse a bracing message in their music.
Berkeley-reared, Juilliard-trained pianist Samora Pinderhughes released his debut album, “The Transformation Suite,” in October 2016, but the multimedia project evolved over several years with the rise of a national movement to counter the violence ending a disproportionate number of black lives. Encompassing spoken-word passages, projected images and vocals, “Transformation Suite” is part of a stellar double bill at 7:30 tonight that kicks off SFJazz’s four-night “Jazz and Social Justice” concert series.
Pinderhughes has performed his sixpart suite around the world and premiered it on the West Coast two years ago at Berkeley’s The Way Christian Center, where the activist Pastor Mike McBride is a longtime family friend. The work has continued to evolve since then, “with some themes you’ll recognize from the record and other things that are completely new, like Stephon Clark is in there now,” says Pinderhughes, referring to the 22-year-old unarmed Sacramento man killed last month in a police shooting.
“At heart, it’s a theater piece, a multidisciplinary form, and the record was conceived later. I wish I could put it to bed, but things keep happening that make it relevant and people keep asking for it.”
A Berkeley High graduate who played piano in the vaunted Berkeley High Jazz Band (his younger sister is the rapidly
rising flute and vocal star Elena Pinderhughes), he credits UC Berkeley’s Young Musicians Program with providing his bedrock musical education.
Samora acquired a love of language at home from his parents, Howard and Raquel Pinderhughes — he teaches behavioral science at UCSF’s school of nursing, and she’s an urban planning professor at San Francisco State. But it was his exposure to the slam poetry movement via Youth Speaks that planted the seeds for “Transformation Suite.”
“That’s when I got obsessed with language,” he says. “Then I started to do more work with Anna Deavere Smith. She always talks about the music of language. I was thinking my passion for language was taking me outside of music, but she showed me it was actually bringing me further in. Music and language work together but in different ways, activating different parts of the brain and soul.”
Activating the soul is the aim of drummer-composer Jaimeo Brown, who shares tonight’s SFJazz double bill in Miner Auditorium. A fellow Bay Area transplant in New York, he presents his spiritually
charged project “Transcendence” introduced on his acclaimed 2016 debut album on Motéma.
Working with Chris Sholar on guitar and electronics and alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw, he weaves a sumptuous sonic tapestry by sampling classic field recordings by Alabama’s Gee’s Bend singers performing traditional songs like “This World Is a Mean World” and “You Can’t Hide (Death’s Got a Warrant).”
Brown is several years older than Pinderhughes, and their paths didn’t cross until they shared a 2016 double bill at Brooklyn Bowl, “which is when I heard his project and was blown away by it,” Pinderhughes says. “The level of care with which he approached the music is really special.”
Meanwhile, careful casting is the key behind “Songs of Freedom: Mitchell, Lincoln and Simone,” a celebration of three iconic women songwriters that makes its Bay Area premiere at 7:30 tonight at Bing Concert Hall. Presented by Stanford Live, the production was conceived and designed by jazz drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. as a celebration of the struggle for personal, creative and political freedom represented by
the lives and music of Joni Mitchell, Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone.
The concert features three extraordinary vocalists: German-born Theo Bleckmann, a master improviser who first gained attention working with Meredith Monk; gospel powerhouse Alicia Olatuja, who spent two years touring pianist pianist/arranger Billy Childs’ Grammy Awardwinning Laura Nyro project; and rising jazz singer Joanna Majoko, who grew up in her parents’ homelands, Germany and Zimbabwe.
The stakes are different today for outspoken artists, Owens says, pointing out that “Abbey lost a career behind this material. She was an actress and on her way to be the next Diahann Carroll when she recorded ‘We Insist!’ with Max Roach and was blackballed. Nina wanted to be a classical pianist, and was kept out of the Curtis Institute. All three women were fighting for freedom to be themselves. We’re not in that same position. We’re fighting for a collective freedom.”