Cathedral Provides Special Grace

The performances in Grace Cathedral have always been among the most pleasurable aspects of the San Francisco Jazz Festival. The enormous, high-ceilinged space, with its lingering echoes, has triggered remarkable efforts from a long series of instrumentalists and singers, including, among others, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Greg Osby, Joe Lovano and singer Ann Dyer.

The Grace Cathedral performers for this year’s festival, which runs from Oct. 24 through November, are saxophonist Charles Lloyd and tabla player Zakir Hussain. The combination of these two supremely gifted artists--an encounter between the improvisational arts of America and India--is undeniably appealing. Even so, the advance ticket sales for the event have generated considerably more activity than past programs at the venue.

“The Sacred Concert has done far better than we anticipated,” says Randall Kline, the festival’s founder and executive director. “We’re already sold out, and that’s the first time we’ve had a sellout for a cathedral event. I’m sure that’s because, given the events of the past few weeks, people are seeking some sort of religion-through-music experience, and the cathedral hall tends to encourage those sorts of feelings.”

The festival, in its 19th installment, has become such an ingrained part of the San Francisco fall cultural season that ticket sales were already brisk even before the attacks of Sept. 11. But unlike at numerous venues around the country, sales continued at a lively pace thereafter.

“I can’t really explain it,” Kline says. “The weird thing is that people were actually buying tickets on Sept. 11--which is not something that would, in all honesty, have been at the front of my mind at the time. I just wish we could have more year-round activity for jazz throughout San Francisco, and not simply as part of the fall season.”

Kline gave considerable thought to the question of whether to offer any sort of special acknowledgment of Sept. 11 during the festival. He finally decided to let the music speak for itself.

“We’ll have a dedication in the program book to people who have died, to the survivors and to those who have worked righting things in New York and Washington,” he explains. “But there isn’t very much, I believe, that we can really do other than present the music. For me, jazz, which is so essentially soulful, is the perfect vehicle for the expression of the full range of feelings--pain, introspection, inspiration, all the sorts of things that people are looking for right now.”

There will be many opportunities to experience that “full range of feelings” in the festival lineup. With more than two dozen events from which to choose, there’s something for virtually every taste. Want to hit some of the more adventurous musical high points? Here’s a quick run through my personal preferences:

* Oct. 24. McCoy Tyner, Tommy Flanagan and Pharoah Sanders revisit their past associations with a jazz icon in a program titled “A Love Supreme: John Coltrane 75th Anniversary Celebration” at the Masonic Auditorium.

* Oct. 25. A pair of audaciously contemporary tenor saxophonists, David Murray and Odean Pope, cruise the outer limits of improvisation in the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial.

* Oct. 27. Clarinetist Don Byron, who moves effortlessly between genres, presents music from his new Blue Note recording, “You Are #6,” at the Herbst Theatre.

* Oct. 28. Avant-garde meets world meets jazz in “Avant World” with Terry Riley, Fred Firth and others at the Herbst Theatre.

* Oct. 29. Bill Frisell tugs at the roots of African and American guitar in duos with Africa’s Boubacar Traore and steel guitarist Greg Leisz at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

* Oct. 31. Charlie Haden’s atmospheric collection of Latin ballads, “Nocturne” (with Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Joe Lovano), at the Herbst Theatre.

* Nov. 2. The above-mentioned duo of Lloyd and Hussain at the Grace Cathedral.

* Nov. 3. A tribute to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, with James Carter, Steve Turre, Mulgrew Miller and others at the Herbst Theatre.

* Nov. 4. Concerts by the trios of two gifted pianists: Denny Zeitlin at the Florence Gould Theatre; Keith Jarrett at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. (Jarrett also appears in Los Angeles a week earlier, on Oct. 28, at Royce Hall, replacing the now-canceled Music Center concert originally scheduled for Oct. 26.)

Strangely enough, despite its numerous attractive entries, the program did not exactly ring creative bells for Kline when it was first assembled.

“I’m finally getting a little perspective on it,” he says. “When I finished the lineup, I was convinced it was the worst I’d ever done--not swingin’, to use a phrase from Wynton Marsalis. But it’s not the first time I’ve felt that way. It’s not until I get far enough away from the sheer battle of getting it all lined up that I can finally view it as a fan. And the truth is that there’s a lot here that I would love to see, even if I had to pay for my own ticket.”

Tickets for the San Francisco Jazz Festival are available by phone at (415) 776-1999, online at https://www.sfjazz.org, and in person at the SFJazz Store, 3 Embarcadero Center, Lobby Level, San Francisco. Some events are already sold out.

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Global Sounds: Among the many other casualties of the situation in Afghanistan--both pre-and post-Sept. 11--are the country’s diverse forms of music. Situated essentially between India, China and the Middle East, Afghan artists have developed sounds that dip freely in all directions, from the arching ragas of India to the sensuous rhythms of Iran. Unfortunately, the expression of this wonderfully improvisational music--the very act of listening to it on the radio--has been virtually forbidden since the Taliban’s assumption of power.

Many Afghan artists, refusing to be silenced, joined the flow of refugees streaming out of the country, with some winding up in expatriate havens in Hungary. A taste of what their music is like, as well as an insightful overview of the refugee music situation, can be found on the Web site https://www.xenomusic.com . The site, in addition to its refugee material, is a particularly rich source of material--jazz, folk and otherwise--much of it available via MP3 downloads (charged, not free) from Eastern Europe and the Middle East.