"About Place": SFJAZZ Collective write new music inspired by Bay Area visual artists

In the early 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to the center of the New York art scene. His boldly colored canvases and graffiti-like brushstrokes are often associated with early hip-hop culture — but, in fact, he drew special inspiration from jazz. He referenced Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk in his artworks, which telegraph the zigzagging rhythms and improvisatory spirit of his heroes. "Art is how we decorate space,” he explained, “music is how we decorate time.”

Today, The SFJAZZ Collective is jumping into the same world that held such allure for Basquiat — a world where music and the visual arts are two sides of the same coin.

In collaboration with the de Young Museum, the Collective is using visual artworks as the springboard for a new program of original musical compositions: “It’s always seemed like an interesting avenue to explore,” says saxophonist Chris Potter, the Collective’s music director. “Because, in a certain sense, any art form is going toward the same goal — trying to find a way to express the inexpressible, trying to find some kind of truth about life.”

By using visual works as inspiration for composing music, he has found, “You can get yourself out of the world of notes, specifically, and into what you are trying to say as an artist.”

The Collective will premiere its new program Oct. 24-27 in Miner Auditorium at the SFJAZZ Center. Each of the band’s seven members has chosen an artwork from a collection of works by contemporary Bay Area artists at the de Young and has used it as a launching pad for composition. As the group performs each new musical piece, the corresponding visual image will be projected onto the walls and ceiling of the concert hall, offering the audience an immersive “sight and sound” experience.

The project began to take shape in May when the band went to the de Young for a private tour of artworks from the collection. (It was acquired in 2022, courtesy of the Svane Family Foundation, founded by software executive Mikkel Svane. The museum’s current “About Place” exhibition, which runs through November 2025, is drawn from the collection.)

Trumpeter Mike Rodriguez remembers feeling apprehensive during the visit: “I was thinking, `Okay, I’ve never composed from a painting before.’ I’d say it was overwhelming or a little scary, because I don’t want to misrepresent what the artist is doing.”

When he noticed a painting titled “Walking in rainbow rain,” his apprehension dissolved: “I started hearing something right away,” he says, still sounding surprised. “I was hearing music.”

Painted in 2021 by Claire Rojas, from San Francisco’s Mission School movement, “Walking in rainbow rain” depicts a lone figure on a drizzly day in the city. Its mood is muted. The figure wears a gray raincoat with a hood. The background, almost a matching gray, is drizzled with rainbow-colored raindrops.

“Something about it just grabbed my eyes,” recalls Rodriguez. Maybe it was the colors, he says, or the rainbow rain. “But it just stuck with me, and I started writing something in a 3/2” time signature, at medium tempo. He sensed the painting’s mood: “It has a vibe. Not gloomy. But it’s gray like the fog of San Francisco and it shows a reflective moment for the person in the painting. So that’s what I responded to.”

He did some reading about the work and began to turn his musical sketch into a full-grown composition. “There’s a little bird down in the corner (of the painting),” he says, “and it’s supposed to symbolize freedom — being able to take off and not conform to the norms of society. So I wanted my melody to convey that, and not repeat itself, as the music takes off and develops.” Seeing the rainbow rain as symbolic of historic challenges faced by San Francisco’s LGBTQ community, he composed “a middle section to bring the sound of hope and freedom, trying to tie that all in.”

During the group’s visit to the de Young in May, vibraphonist Warren Wolf gravitated to another of the artworks: Sadie Barnette’s “FBI Drawings: Legal Ritual.” (It was part of last year’s “Crafting Radicality” exhibition at the de Young, also drawn from the Svane collection.) In this work, from 2021, the Oakland-based artist uses powdered graphite and colored pencil to recreate what look like giant carbon copies of pages from the 500-page FBI dossier on her father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.

In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, the artist described the dossier — released to her family about five years after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request — as “chilling, emotional, disturbing, and violent. Surveillance sometimes sounds like an innocuous information-collecting process, but it’s often harassment, intimidation, and agent provocateurs. In 1969, because of his political activism, my father was fired from his job at the post office. My initial reaction to these documents was: One, this is terrifying, and two, I’m lucky that my dad lived and I’m lucky that I’m alive. I thought, `How can I reclaim this material?’”

Wolf was also fascinated: “The FBI assembled 500 pages of documents on this man, and they tracked his every movement — and not just him, but his friends, his neighbors, all because he was part of the Panther alliance. He got fired from his job. I was just taken by the story and what the artist did with it.” She had adorned her recreations of the stark, black and white documents with roses, symbols of life and love. “I thought, `Hmmm. I’ll take that one.’”

Preparing to compose, he thought back to the politics and popular music of the period: “The Temptations’ `Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’ kept popping into my mind. And I tried to take some of the feeling of those times for my piece.” It includes a middle section “that’s kind of a vamp for the rhythm section and that’s when I’m planning to do something that hasn’t been done before in the history of the Collective,” he says. “I’m going to speak the story while the music is playing. I’ll talk about the artist’s father, talk about the artwork, and then I’ll jump back to the vibraphone for the rest of the piece.”

Founded in 2004 (Bobby Hutcherson and Joshua Redman were among its original members), the Collective made a name for itself by rearranging works by well-known composers: Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk, Stevie Wonder, Antônio Carlos Jobim, among others. Band members also composed original pieces, but it isn't until last season that they composed nothing but original works. The result was a suite titled New Works Reflecting the Moment. Each member of the band chose a theme — climate change, freedom, the global pandemic, George Floyd and racial injustice — that served as a jump-off point for composition.

Now turning to the visual arts, the Collective joins a unique tradition, embodied by Basquiat, who once said, “I wanted to be a jazz musician, but I couldn’t play anything. So I became an artist, and my paintings became my music.”

Henri Matisse created a series of collages inspired by and titled “Jazz.” The painter Larry Rivers, an Abstract Expressionist whose work is a precursor to Pop Art, was a saxophonist and a passionate Thelonious Monk fan; whenever Monk played at the Five Spot, Rivers was there. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who also played at the Five Spot (and occasionally with Monk), was inspired by the painters Arshile Gorky and Keith Haring, recording tributes to each. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis found inspiration in the artist Romare Bearden and created an album in tribute, Romare Bearden Revisited.

Joining this stream has turned out to be a “welcoming” experience, Chris Potter says. He remembers flipping through art books while growing up in Columbia, S.C. “Then when I moved to New York when I was 18,” he says, “I started going to museums and it was amazing to see all these works of art that I only knew from reproductions. To see the actual piece of canvas that the artist worked on was a magical thing.”

He remains a museum-goer: “If I’m in Madrid and have a day free, I’ll go to the Prado.” But he tends not to spend more than a couple of hours in any museum, because “it can be hard to keep your level of concentration up, and I prefer to see things in detail and really try to get a handle on what’s going on.”

At the de Young in May, he chose a work by Bay Area artist Chris Johanson, titled “Unknow Know with What is 12,” from 2021. Painted on recycled canvas, its title plays on a statement by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, when asked to comment on the lack of evidence linking the Iraqi government to weapons of mass destruction, he said, “There are unknown unknowns.”

But in choosing Johanson’s piece, Potter isn’t making a political statement. He was attracted to the painting’s “swirliness. It’s filled with swirlies, and it’s extremely colorful and quite abstract.” Responding to the colors and motion in the painting, he found himself “favoring major keys… and changing keys a lot in that swirly way.” Much of his piece is composed in the unorthodox time signature of 11/8, because it lends the music a certain “lilt” or “off-kilter quality” that he enjoys in Johanson’s swirliness.

In the end, the painting and the music somehow share a sense of optimism, he says. “It’s not like there’s a right or wrong way of doing this. It’s the feeling.”

The SFJAZZ Collective performs music from their project devoted to the de Young Museum's "About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift" exhibition, 10/24-27. Tickets and more information are available here. The 10/25 performance will be broadcast live at sfjazz.org as part of the Fridays Live series. Watch the concert here.

A staff writer at SFJAZZ, Richard Scheinin is a lifelong journalist. He was the San Jose Mercury News' classical music and jazz critic for more than a decade and has profiled scores of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa and the Dalai Lama.