SFJAZZ presents a Tony Williams Tribute Concert curated
by Cindy Blackman Santana featuring SFJAZZ Collective and many more!
Robert M. Miner Auditorium
SFJAZZ Center, 205 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94102 USA
7:30 PM, Thursday, January 19, 2017
Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2017 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2017 event list! ☸ On to the next event!
[7:41 PM lights down, Introduction by Randall Kline; first group up: Eric Harland, Zakir Hussain & Joshua Redman]
[9:02 PM lights down, Randall Kline introduces the Kronos Quartet with Cindy Blackman Santana and Edward Simon]
Wow, what a night!
It was exhausting trying to keep up with all the personnel and programmatic changes, and while a few choices seemed tangential to tonight's honoree, it was all terrific fun. I was quite happy to witness the opening trio of Eric Harland, Zakir Hussain and Joshua Redman, although given that Handy and Hussain recorded a couple albums together in the mid-1970's (with Ali Akbar Khan!), I thought their performance would have fit better against the John Handy Tribute on Sunday. And I should thank Randall for back-announcing the title of the tune – I never would have picked that one up!
I really enjoyed the SFJAZZ Collective portion of the show, and thought it somewhat novel of them to begin the night operating as a quintet (all the better to evoke the mid-20th Century Miles Davis Quintet, right?). Freedom Jazz Dance and Nardis? Oh yeah! GREAT song selection!
Mary Stalling's rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim's Triste was certainly beautiful, but like the opener, was probably more appropriately matched to another night – in this case, tomorrow's Joe Henderson tribute. I would have guessed they could have found something with a better connection to Tony for tonight, but maybe that's too churlish of me to expect?
The first set closer, Tony's Sister Cheryl was another burner, with plenty of solo time given to each of the soloists. In fact, everyone got plenty of solo time in every tune played tonight – pretty much every tune exceeded ten minutes duration except for Triste, and that came close! Sometimes long tunes can be a sign of laziness, but tonight I thought the performers really brought their chops, and it was a surprise to realize they'd been playing over an hour when things wound down at the close of the tune. Time's fun when you're shagging flies!
Because my neighbors had been thoroughly annoying: intermittently chatty, humming along to the solos, playing hand percussion on the program book, and otherwise offering near constant distraction, I took set break as an opportunity to find a new seat, moving a few rows down and much closer to the center. Hard to argue with that choice, right?
As you might guess, I was really happy with my new seat, and the second set was quite interesting to listen two. Composed of two very distinct halves, the first part presented a reprise of Tony's 1990 composition, Rituals, originally written for an SFJAZZ show at Herbst Theatre featuring the Kronos Quartet, accompanied by Tony and Herbie Hancock. I enjoyed hearing the piece, and wish I'd been smart enough to attend the original gig – my guess is that I just wasn't tuned in to SFJAZZ' offerings back then. As you might guess, Cindy Blackman (who rehearsed the piece with Kronos as back-up for Tony, leading up to the original performance) had to exercise considerable restraint to keep the volume balanced against Kronos.
There was no such problem for the last part of the show, a blast of fusion based on Tony's first Lifetime Trio album, Emergency!; this section was loud as heck! I added titles for the second two tunes based on the info provided with the DIME torrent (see below), but I can't confirm whether or not it's correct. My impression that night was that I couldn't tell whether they played a single long suite with multiple parts or instead just jammed a bunch of tunes together. Guess I oughtta grab that torrent and give it a listen!
Given that I had the highest expectations for this material, it's probably not too surprising that I felt like it was the part that could have used the most additional rehearsal. The Lifetime tunes are fierce and uncompromisingly difficult; when you try and walk the tightrope like that, you gotta know that every wobble and misstep is going to be received with a gasp. Happily, the quartet managed to avoid any major trainwrecks, but it certainly seemed to me as if the splinters were flying as they smashed through the score on these final numbers. Whew!
Sadly, the show seems to have happened without acknowledgement from the press: another sad comment on the invisibility of creative music in our society.
Rusty Aceves posted A Portrait of Cindy Blackman Santana on the SFJAZZ blog.
Richard Scheinin posted a promo article for the entire gala series; the section on Tony Williams includes a nice anecdote about his connection with Cindy Blackman Santana.
Apparently the show was streamed (?almost live?) in Europe; a torrent of most of the show has popped up on DIME in case you want to give it a listen yourself.
Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2017 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2017 event list! ☸ On to the next event!