SFJazz finally gets to host NEA concert — online
Jazz Masters tribute show features Bobby McFerrin, Dee Dee Bridgewater and more
From exultation to dejection to cautious optimism, SFJazz’s unprecedented role in bringing the ceremony honoring the nation’s highest jazz honors to the West Coast has turned into an emotional roller-coaster ride.
After winning, postponing and then canceling the April 2 live concert featuring the 2020 recipients of the NEA Jazz Masters Awards, SFJazz has reinvented the event as a pandemic-proof online celebration.
Produced by SFJazz and hosted by vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, a 2017 NEA Jazz Master, today’s broadcast of the NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert builds on the San Francisco organization’s ongoing weekly virtual concert series, Fridays at Five. With Grammy Award-winning drummer Terri Lyne Carrington serving as music director, the event honors the four newly minted NEA Jazz Masters, bassist Reggie Workman, vocalist Bobby McFerrin, saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and jazz advocate Dorthaan Kirk.
“After the Fridays at Five concerts started to show promise we approached the NEA about doing the tribute online,” said Randall Kline, SFJazz’s founder and executive artistic director. “We had some models and looked at the galas for the Met and Jazz at Lincoln Center. We realized this isn’t necessarily about putting on a live show. It’s about the impression of being live.”
The Fridays at Five series presents SFJazz Center performances that were artfully captured on video. On Friday, SFJazz shares a Feb. 24, 2019, concert by Dianne Reeves, a 2018 NEA Jazz Master, and on Aug. 28 the organization presents Joshua Redman, Ambrose Akinmusire, Danilo Pérez,
John Patitucci and Brian Blade in a fourth installment of the January 2019 concerts celebrating saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter, a 1998 NEA Jazz Master.
Part of what makes the Fridays at Five broadcasts more than a concert film is that the featured musicians often hang out in the webpage’s chat section, fielding comments from fans and colleagues in real time. At the third concert broadcast celebrating Shorter, which SFJazz broadcast on July 31, Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard were almost giddy in responding to the flow of praise for their blazing performance, including comments from Shorter himself (all of the money donated during the Shorter shows go directly to covering his ongoing medical needs).
Curated by Herbie Hancock, the Shorter celebration is the kind of event that has earned SFJazz renown as one of the world’s leading jazz presenters. When the NEA announced last year it had tapped SFJazz to present the nation’s flagship jazz awards ceremony, it was a striking affirmation for the organization. With so much of the national media and cultural establishment still liable to overlook developments on the West Coast, presenting the NEA Jazz Master Awards Tribute Concert outside of New York City or Washington, D.C., for the first time was seen as a major triumph for the Bay Area.
“There is such a lively jazz scene in San Francisco and other parts of California,” said Ann Meier Baker, director of Music & Opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. “The SFJazz Center is a venue that was built for jazz, and we were thrilled to spread our wings.”
The timing seemed particularly felicitous as most of the 2020 NEA Jazz Masters have deep ties to the Bay Area. Bobby McFerrin got his start in the late 1970s performing at little clubs around San Francisco and Berkeley. His influence still reverberates through the region, as original members of his a cappella ensemble Voicestra, such as Raz Kennedy, Linda Tillery and Molly Holm, have influenced generations of vocalists.
As a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell has performed often in the Bay Area since the 1970s, expanding sonic frontiers for many artists. But it was through his 11year stint holding the prestigious Darius Milhaud Chair in Music Composition at Mills College from 2008-2018 that he forged or deepened relationships with a panoply of adventurous improvisers, many of whom were drawn to the Oakland school by his presence.
Dorthaan Kirk, the widow of legendary saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-1977), has been a guiding force at the powerhouse Newark, N.J., public radio station WBGO, a pillar of jazz broadcasting. She’s been a frequent presence at the annual Rahsaanathon concert series at San Jose’s Cafe Stritch (which takes its name from one of the obscure reed instruments played by Kirk).
Though SFJazz has presented Reggie Workman several times in the all-star ensemble Trio 3 with saxophonist Oliver Lake and drummer Andrew Cyrille, he hasn’t performed regularly in the Bay Area for decades. But the 83-year-old bassist has fond memories of the San Francisco scene since making his Bay Area debut in 1959 at the Jazz Workshop in North Beach with pianist Red Garland.
“I came through once with John Coltrane, and a few times with Herbie Mann,” said Workman, who also spent several years as part of one of the most celebrated editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. “That neighborhood was so vibrant. Just great audiences, with a lot of music around.”