2013-14 Season
Season 8 is bass heavy. Nearly half of this year's bands are led or co-led by stand-up bassists. (So sue us: we like the low end.) And not that we've been rabid nativists till now, but the new line-up also looks unusually cosmopolitan. The bassists alone represent Denmark, Malaysia by way of Australia, and Israel; other prospective visitors hail from England, Sweden, the Netherlands, and—counting one expat—Germany. (Plenty of home-grown talent, as well, including a Humboldt native or two.) We've still got the usual mix of Critics' Poll winners, Guggenheim fellows, MacArthur "geniuses," and NPR featured artists, not to mention rising stars, unsung heroes, and just plain all-around great players. Fold that into a solid base of open-eared listeners and generous supporters, and you've got a recipe for a great season.
Our prices haven't changed in eight years: $15 General Admission and $10 for students & seniors. Advance tickets for most shows will be available at Wildberries Marketplace, Wildwood Music, People's Records, and the Works—and (along with discounted season tickets) here at our website. (Please take note: we'll soon be switching from Google Checkout to Brown Paper Tickets. Also: special arrangements will be in place for our final show in April, a collaboration with Center Arts.) Most of this season's guests will also present a workshop or clinic, free and open to the public, usually the morning after the scheduled concert. As the season unfolds, click on each artist's name below to see a web page devoted to him or her. And feel free to contact us at rja@redwoodjazzalliance.org with questions, comments, and donations!
Listen to the 2013-14 Season Mixtape on Soundcloud |
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Phronesis We don’t like to brag, but by the time NPR Music endorsed Phronesis as one of “5 Young British Jazz Artists to Watch” back in 2010, we were already watching—and listening. So was the rest of the world: that same year the trio, at the forefront of the European club and festival scene, crossed the pond to wow audiences at the Montreal International Jazz Festival and at New York’s legendary Jazz Standard. Meanwhile the UK’s influential Jazzwise magazine crowned their third CD, Alive, “Album of the Year.” This fall, they’re bringing their trademark sound—catchy hooks, complex changes, crackling rhythms, and lithe but tight-knit grooves—to the Monterey Jazz Festival…and to the RJA.
phronesismusic.com
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The Claudia Quintet Sometimes they’re a swinging big band, other times hipsters in a cool lounge act. They can sound like almost anything: an Ellington combo, a Scandinavian tone poem, the soundtrack to a film noir, even an indie band rocking en clavé. In the end, though, they sound like no one in the world but the Claudia Quintet. Each player is a consummate virtuoso with his own star on the jazz sidewalk of fame. And yet the ensemble interplay is wholly original, sometimes uncanny, distinguished by the group’s intense concentration on Hollenbeck’s often-gorgeous eclecticism, which dares to be both experimental and lyrical. “Precisely calibrated but willfully spontaneous chamber-jazz,” quips Nate Chinen in the New York Times. Come hear that regulated spontaneity for yourself.
johnhollenbeck.com |
 Photo: Steve J. Sherman |
Fred Hersch Trio Jazz piano doesn’t get any better than Fred Hersch. His 35-year career includes more than 40 albums as a leader or co-leader and annual weeklong residencies at the storied Village Vanguard. The New York Times called him “singular among the trailblazers of their art”; Vanity Fair, “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade or so.” A younger peer, the great pianist Jason Moran, says that “Fred at the piano is like LeBron James on the basketball court. He’s perfection.” All we can add is that Hersch’s music is deeply beautiful and swings like mad, and his current trio is one of the finest working bands in jazz. This is the gold standard.
fredhersch.com |
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Omer Avital Quintet It’s hard to think of music more joyous than Omer Avital’s. The Israeli bassist came up amidst the vibrant scene at Smalls, the storied Greenwich Village jazz stronghold, in the 1990s. And even though these days he tours all over the world, in a sense he never left that cellar club: with his bobbing head, his blissed-out grin, and his soulful shouts, he’s still Smalls' most visible genius loci. NPR, who put last year’s Suite of the East among its top 10 discs of 2012, says Avital’s music is animated by “ecstatic playfulness,” his repertoire a seamless fusion of the “Sephardic with the swinging.”
omeravital.com |
 Photo: Jean-Baptiste Guillemin |
Linda Oh Sun Pictures The twenty-something Australian, born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, first made a splash in 2009 with a self-released debut album that showcased powerful playing, adventurous writing, and a little-known trumpet prodigy from the Bay Area named Ambrose Akinmusire. She generated even bigger waves in early 2012 with Initial Here, a monster quartet date on Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf Music label. (Not by coincidence, she’d also landed high-profile gigs in Soundprints, the supergroup co-led by Douglas and Joe Lovano, and in the new incarnation of Douglas’s own quintet.) Yeah, we know: another young, talented female bassist has been in the spotlight these past few years. But Oh’s talents are every bit as great. We think it’s her turn to shine.
lindaohmusic.com |
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Michael Moore Quartet Michael Moore is undoubtedly a Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition (as the DownBeat critics poll has put it), but most local music fans need no introduction. Not only is he one of Humboldt County’s favorite sons, but we’ve hosted him twice before, with the ICP Orchestra and with the cooperative trio of Holshouser, Bennink and Moore. This time, he’s coming as a leader, and he’s bringing another HumCo expatriate, the inventive and swinging drummer Michael Vatcher. The group’s other two members, pianist Harmen Fraanje and bassist Clemens van der Feen, are natives of the Netherlands, Moore and Vatcher’s home base for the past 30-plus years. Like Michael, the quartet’s playing is, in the words on one critic, “warm and subtly subversive,” informed by the tradition, but always willing to go wherever the music leads.
ramboyrecordings.com
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Regina Carter's Southern Comfort Detroit may be in the news for its troubles right now, but in jazz circles it's known for producing a long line of brilliant musicians like Regina Carter. Carter’s classical training took her to the youth division of the Detroit Symphony, but by college she was studying with jazz trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and in the mid-nineties she stepped forward with a series of albums exploring different facets of her musical legacy, from Motor City Moments to Paganini: After A Dream (she played the master’s 1743 Guarnerius) to Reverse Thread, which traced the African roots of Black American music. With “Southern Comfort,” she invokes the experience of her father and grandfather with the music of Appalachia and the American South. SFJazz calls Carter’s violin “a passport to unexpected realms, a Rosetta stone that unlocks the door to a myriad of cultures and worlds.” We’re glad to be partnering with Center Arts on that journey.
reginacarter.com |
