Tickets are now on sale to the 8th Annual Spring Season, which boasts an astounding variety of music, including:

• Living legends Dave Brubeck, Etta James, McCoy Tyner and Allen Toussaint
• The Monk Project (read more below)
• Modern masters Bill Frisell, Dave Holland, Poncho Sanchez, and Joshua Redman’s new acoustic Trio
• Vocal dynamos Dianne Reeves, Freddy Cole, and Paula West
• Global superstars Carlinhos Brown, Anoushka Shankar, the Assad Brothers with the Turtle Island String Quartet, and Dulce Pontes
• And much, much more...

Great seats are still available, but they’re going fast! Order yours today online or by calling 800-225-2277.

The Monk Project is a Spring Season-long tribute to jazz titan Thelonious Monk. The celebratory series of concerts, education events, 2007 “Straight, No Chaser” Gala (benefiting SFJAZZ artistic and educational programs) and more takes place in what would have been Monk’s 90th Birthday year.

Monk’s innovations were simultaneously far-reaching and rooted in tradition. The lineage of his piano playing extends from the Harlem stride piano (featured at our Stride Piano Summit [6/17]) of his childhood home, New York City, through the urbane sophistication of Duke Ellington. Yet in Monk’s hands the leaping bass and filigreed right-hand improvisation of stride blossomed into a distinct, instantly recognizable style. “His touch always seems startled,” jazz critic Whitney Balliett wrote of Monk’s pianism, “scurrying, barely struck notes alternate with sudden, heavy chords that surprise the listeners as sharply as a thump on the back.”

Monk played with bebop legends from Dizzy Gillespie to Miles Davis, before launching his career as a bandleader in the late’40s. By the mid ‘50s Orrin Keepnews (who will lead a Members-only Listening Party on Monk’s music 5/3) had signed Monk to Riverside—the label where he’d record his most important albums—and the pianist settled into a months-long residency at New York City’s Five Spot Café with saxophonist John Coltrane. This same quartet was featured on the recent re-discovered Carnegie Hall concert — which will receive an all-star reinterpretation May 4 by Joshua Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), and Brian  Blade (drums). Another classic Monk concert revived this Spring Season is the large-band Town Hall date. Pianist Jason Moran and Monk’s son, drummer T.S. Monk, will lead this homage.

With an unerring melodic instinct, and an unorthodox improvisational impulse to deconstruct his beautiful tunes, Monk made a potent contribution to the evolution of the jazz canon. SFJAZZ Collective (and Spring Season) Artistic Director Joshua Redman described the challenges of working with Monk’s music: “There is such an innate sense of modernism in his works, something invariably fresh and compelling—melodies that are deceptively simple on first hearing, framed by harmonies that are so rich and complex, and driven by rhythms that are so compelling and infectious. To rehearse and premiere our own originals in the context of Monk’s music is sure to inspire exciting new directions in the Collective’s sound.” Readers can get a full dose of Monk’s sound at the Collective’s two March 11 shows, or at any of the other very special Monk Project shows.