Fall festival Sneak Preview

25TH Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival: September 22-November 30 Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ravi Shankar, Many More—Over 30 Events!

Over 25 years, the San Francisco Jazz Festival has grown from a three-day event called “Jazz in the City” to a four-week, citywide celebration of jazz praised as  “one of America’s premier cultural events” (Los Angeles Times). With over 30 world-class jazz concerts at San Francisco’s most revered venues and a kaleidoscopic array of artists from every corner of the globe, this fall will be a delight for music fans of every stripe. Tickets for the 25th Anniversary San Francisco Jazz Festival, running from September 22 through November 30, go on sale exclusively to SFJAZZ Members on Sunday, June 24. The Members-only period wraps up three weeks later, with tickets going on sale to the general public on Sunday, July 15.

The Festival’s 25th Anniversary season commemorates years of unforgettable performances with a schedule that touches on highlights from the past quarter-century while pointing the way ahead to many more years of music. Here is a sneak preview of just a few remarkable artists coming to San Francisco this fall:

Jazz Legends

From the beginning, the Festival has presented the most venerated, renowned musicians in jazz. Legendary saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman returns to San Francisco’s Masonic Center on October 28. One of jazz’s most important musicians, Lifetime Grammy-winner Coleman has received a flurry of acclaim for his most recent album, Sound Grammar—including a 2007 Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times called it “Elastic and bracing...the music harks back to the 1960s records that made him famous.”

Coleman called his ex-sideman Pharoah Sanders “probably the best tenor player in the world.” Sanders returns to the Festival October 17 for his second Sacred Space concert. In this transcendent marriage of artistry and ambiance, Sanders will fill the majestic Grace Cathedral with his “impossibly sweet and full tenor saxophone sound” (The Independent, London).

Six-string devotees must catch guitar god John McLaughlin when he plays the Masonic Center on September 22. McLaughlin’s incendiary rock-influenced sound—a  “singular guitar vocabulary of lightning gossamer runs, dark chordal shadings, jagged and dense melodic lines, and long echoey silences” (Los Angeles Times)—was a centerpiece of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew-era recordings, drummer Tony Williams’ “Lifetime” band, and his own trailblazing Mahavishnu Orchestra. He returns to his electric roots, as on his powerful new CD Industrial Zen.

World Music Masters

The New York Times calls Ravi Shankar (11/2) “not only the greatest living master of the sitar, but also one of the most masterly instrumentalists of any sort in the world today.” Shankar was instrumental in bringing Classical Indian music to the West, both through his work with the Beatles (George Harrison christened him the “Godfather of World Music”), to his compositions for orchestra, chamber groups, and movie soundtracks. His legacy continues through the virtuosity of his many disciples, most notably his daughter Anoushka, who will join Shankar onstage at the Masonic Center.

Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso is “one of the greatest songwriters of the [20th] century” (The New York Times). One of the founders of Brazil’s influential Tropicalia movement, Veloso has been a Bob Dylan-esque figure at the vanguard of his country’s popular musical culture for almost forty years. Over that period of time he has matched his poetic lyrics with music that draws on reggae, folk, jazz, pop, and traditional Brazilian sounds. His 40th album, Cê, features a decidedly looser, rock-based sound inspired by Veloso’s collaboration with his son Moreno.

On the other side of the Atlantic, equally influential Grammy-winning Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour merged Senegalese dance rhythms, electric rock guitar, Afro-Cuban horns, and Muslim chants into mbalax, a style he popularized with his group, Super Etoile de Dakar. N’Dour’s tremendous voice—called an “arresting tenor, a supple weapon deployed with prophetic authority" by The New York Times—has made him an in-demand collaborator for legends like Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, and Sting.

New Works

In 1988 the Festival commissioned its first original piece of music, Anthony Braxton’s “No 132,” and it has continued to be a launching pad for new work by preeminent composers and instrumentalists. The 25th Anniversary season boasts a dazzling variety of original compositions, including an exciting co-commission by Duke University and SFJAZZ for pianist Jason Moran. Moran, who recreated Thelonious Monk’s Town Hall Concert during the 2007 Spring Season, returns to San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre on November 2 to perform “In My Mind,” a multimedia piece inspired by that same concert and Monk archival rarities.

The genre-defying Kronos Quartet team up with Wilco drummer and composer Glenn Kotche on October 25-26 to premiere Kotche’s new work, “Anomaly,” along with new works and guest appearances by Walter Kitundu and South Korean singer/dancer Dohee Lee. The fall will also feature new pieces from some of the Bay Area’s best-known composers including a October 19 double bill of Jon Jang and Marcus Shelby, and John Santos (who performed with Orquestra Batachanga at the inaugural 1983 “Jazz in the City” festival) performing a piece written especially for the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars on November 11.

Many, Many More

In addition to these stellar artists, the 25th Anniversary schedule is filled with a remarkable variety of live jazz and world music including legendary pianist Ahmad Jamal (10/21), Israeli folk singer Chava Alberstein (12/9), a double bill of vocal Rising Stars Jacqui Naylor and Spencer Day (11/3), Cuban singer Isaac Delgado (10/20), percussionist Pete Escovedo (10/27) in the 2007 SFJAZZ Beacon Award concert, and “New Orleans on Nob Hill,” a gumbo-tinged celebration of New Orleans’ musical heritage with “Night Tripper” Dr. John, the Preservation Hall Brass Band, and Big Chief Bo Dollis and The Wild Magnolias (10/27).  Whether it is the Django Reinhardt-inspired  “Gypsy Jazz” of guitarist Dorado Schmitt (11/4) and special guest Paquito D’Rivera, the intoxicating Saharan guitar riffs of Vieux Farke Toure and Tinariwen (11/4), or the Halloween-night thrills and chills of the William Breuker Collective playing their original score along with F.W. Murnau’s silent-film classic Faust, the diverse programming proves underscores why, during the Festival, “the City by the Bay is the jazz capital of the world” (USA Today).