Threadgill, Sanders, Redman Take Spring Season Stage
With San Francisco poised to tie its all-time record for rainy days in March (23!), and April showers forecast for next week, Bay Area residents and visitors might find that spring’s usual burst of freshness and vitality is a bit late in coming this year. Unless, of course, they should happen to check out the SFJAZZ Spring Season in April, as renowned saxophone innovators Henry Threadgill, Pharoah Sanders, and Dewey Redman literally supply a breath of fresh air to lift us out of the rainy-day blues.

Henry Threadgill’s Zooid
April 1 (This Saturday!)
“Even in the avant-garde world,” writes SFGate.com columnist and KPFA-FM radio host Derk Richardson, “too few artists operate on the principle that a genuine love of music must be undiscriminating. At 62, globetrotting saxophonist/flutist/composer Henry Threadgill increasingly embodies and manifests that notion, embracing everything from the most liberating aspects of jazz to the microtones and improvisational subtleties of Indian music.”
Full text of Richardson’s “Music & Nightlife” e-pick on SFGate.com

This Saturday at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, Threadgill furthers his reputation as an “innovator’s innovator” with his latest all-acoustic ensemble, Zooid, weaving his own alto sax and flute lines into a novel tapestry of guitar, cello, trombone, tuba, and drums. While it’s impossible to capture the Zooid sound in a simple phrase, The New York Times comes close with “sweet-and-sour, jazz-tango-Middle-Eastern-funk [from] one of our great composers.”

“Sacred Space II”
Pharoah Sanders, solo (April 21)
Once commended by the late, great tenorman and onetime collaborator John Coltrane as “a man of large spiritual reservoir,” tenor sax master Pharoah Sanders plies his majestic talents in the fittingly spiritual setting of Grace Cathedral in the second of two “Sacred Space” events this spring. Hailed by The Independent (London) for his “impossibly sweet and full tenor saxophone tone,” Sanders has been one of the most revered names in jazz from the days of the ’60s avant-garde through the ’90s “acid jazz” scene and on into the new century—an artist as consistent in his unpredictability as in his transcendence. As Sanders told journalist Dan Ouellette before a previous SFJAZZ concert, even he has no idea what will happen when he takes the stage: “It’s going to be a surprise even to myself. But whatever I do, I’ll be coming to give to the audience. That’s my main purpose in playing.”

Dewey Redman “75th Birthday Celebration” (April 30)
Like Pharoah Sanders, tenor great Dewey Redman first achieved jazz-world renown in the company of one of the icons of 1960s jazz innovation—alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. And also like Sanders, Redman has long since gone beyond such auspicious beginnings to become an acknowledged master in his own right, boasting “limitless capacity for improvisational invention” (JazzTimes). In this milestone birthday celebration, Redman reveals that, now more than ever, he is “a daredevil with time,...nail[ing] the notes with the offhand sweetness of experience” (The New York Times).