SFJazz Blossoms With Spring Season

The San Francisco Jazz Festival’s plan to establish a year-round, world-class presence for the music moves into high gear next month with Spring Season 2001, a five-weekend series of programs running from Feb. 16 through May 27. Combined with the well-established two-week schedule offered every fall and 50-plus free summer concerts in five different series, it positions the organization, now known as SFJazz, as the West Coast’s most significant large-venue jazz presenter.

“We definitely kicked it up for this year’s series in terms of numbers of performances and size of venues,” says Randall Kline, festival founder and director. “But it’s always been sort of typical for us to start out with an ambitious jump and see if it works and if there’s an audience. And we find out that there is--as we did last spring--we just keep expanding and exploring a little more.”

The Spring Season, which was initiated last year, has fully come up to speed with the current offerings. Five thematically oriented weekends have been programmed, filled with a creative density comparable to the well established programs of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The schedule announcement, in fact, comes at a particularly appropriate time, when the Ken Burns documentary “Jazz” is airing. The series gives relatively short shrift to developments of the past few decades. The SFJazz Spring Season effectively counters that shortcoming with a series of programs richly underscoring the music’s continuing creativity and diversity.

Weekend 1: The Trumpet, Feb. 16-18, showcases a Friday night concert by the Nicholas Payton Armstrong Centennial Celebration (a group that also appears at UCLA’s Royce Hall a day earlier, on Thursday). But the SFJazz performance also includes an appearance by Randy Sandke’s Armstrong Jazz All-Stars, featuring Kenny Davern and Wycliffe Gordon in a presentation devoted to Satchmo favorites as well as eight rediscovered Armstrong compositions. The weekend’s trumpet theme continues on Saturday with a film tribute to Armstrong hosted by Terence Blanchard, and a Sunday salute to Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw featuring trumpeters Blanchard, Eddie Henderson, Ingrid Jensen and Brian Lynch.

Weekend 2: The Voice, March 1-4, is a far-ranging view of the manner in which jazz singing has become an international form of expression. It opens on Thursday with a vocal roots experience via a presentation of rare film footage of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Friday’s event has the unusual pairing of the underrated Andy Bey and the offbeat Patricia Barber. On Saturday, the husky, world-weary voice of Italian singer Paolo Conte is featured, followed by a Sunday concert pairing the veteran Dianne Reeves and the up-and-coming Jane Monheit.

Weekend 3: What’s New, March 30-April 1. Surely one of the most unusual events in the series, this weekend’s music events are paralleled by a three-day symposium on the topic of race in jazz. Titled “Jazz and Race: Black, White and Beyond,” the panel features authors, scholars and musicians ranging from authors Nat Hentoff, Richard Sudhalter and Angela Davis to saxophonist Steve Coleman.

“We’ve been talking about doing something like this for a couple of years,” notes Kline, “and when we hired an educational director, we finally were able to do it. And we’re going to have [UC Berkeley sociologist] Harry Edwards moderating all of the panels. We’re anticipating lots of interest.”

The music programs for the weekend are equally appealing, with the premieres of two major compositions by a pair of important young jazz artists, festival artistic director Joshua Redman and Russell Gunn.

Redman’s “Passage of Time,” his most expansive and ambitious work to date, is an extended song cycle. “I see it like a journey that takes place in real time,” he says, “a story that we collectively tell in different chapters.” The work is also the centerpiece of a new recording from the saxophonist, which will be released a few weeks before the festival.

Gunn’s still untitled work is the product of an SFJazz commission. Further explorations into new areas will be present in bassist Avishai Cohen’s blend of jazz and Middle Eastern elements and the mix of jazz, funk and klezmer in the music of bassist Matt Small’s Crushing Spiral Ensemble.

Weekend 4: Solo Piano, April 20-22. The weekend is devoted to solo piano concerts featuring Geri Allen, Gonzalo Rubalcaba and three separate performances by Marcus Roberts, including programs celebrating the American songbook, the history of jazz piano and the works of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton.

“I can’t recall the last time I heard anything about Geri performing a solo program,” says Kline. “And with Marcus, we wanted to give our audiences the chance to hear him in an intimate setting, so we’ve scheduled two performances with different programming, in the relatively small Florence Gould Theatre in Lincoln Park, as well as a larger event on Sunday in the Herbst Theatre.”

Weekend 5: The Bass, May 25-27. The Spring Season wraps up with an overview of three generations of world class bassists. (In fact, when one takes into consideration the presence of Avishai Cohen and Matt Small in the “What’s New” program, the celebration of the bass emerges as a significant festival subtext.) The final weekend also has a veteran-youngster pairing in its Friday night presentation of the Ray Brown Trio and the Christian McBride Band. And it’s a fair bet that the two principals will manage to share the stage sometime during the proceedings. Another intriguing pairing combines the well-crafted music of the Dave Holland Quintet and the wildly eclectic music-dance-rap of Mingus Amungus. The festival closes Sunday with a duo performance by Redman and McBride--virtuosic young artists who represent the best of 21st century jazz.

“We’re fortunate in the fact that the Bay Area seems to be extraordinarily amenable to every kind of jazz,” says Kline. “And I’m always fascinated when we put the shows on sale and see that the buying patterns aren’t necessarily what we expected. For example, we made some of the shows available to SFJazz members a few weeks ago, and I thoroughly expected the Payton-Armstrong concert to be the most popular offering. Wrong. The Freddie Hubbard-Woody Shaw night--even though it’s not super mainstream--has been very hot.

“What more could a jazz concert presenter ask for than to have a sophisticated audience--people who actually gravitate toward the hip stuff?”

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* SFJazz Spring Season 2001 runs from Feb. 16 through May 27 at various venues in San Francisco. Ticket prices range from $5 to $52. Information: (415) 788-7353 or on the Web at https://www.sfjazz.org.