SFJAZZ presents Creole Clarinet featuring Evan Christopher & Clarinet Road
2015-11-15
Joe Henderson Lab
SFJAZZ Center, 205 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA
7:30 PM, Sunday, November 15, 2015

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

[7:3m PM lights down, announcements]

1. [7:39 PM] Bayou Chant
2. [7:51 PM] Mojo Blues
3. [8:05 PM] Nuages
4. [8:15 PM] Tande Sak Fe Loraj Gwonde (Listen to the One Who Makes the Thunder Roar)
5. [8:24 PM] ? There Will Never Be Another You
6. [8:29 PM] El Azul da La Rendicion (Surrender Blue)
7. [8:41 PM] Congo in the Square
   [set ends 8:49 PM]
    
   Encore
8. [8:52 PM] Waltz for All Souls
   [show ends 8:56 PM; all off by 8:58 PM]

• Evan Christopher: clarinet;
• Marshall Hawkins: contrabass;
• Nahum Zdybel: guitar.

All in all, today worked out quite well, a fine day of friendship and music. Things started out slowly, as Sundays are wont to do. Good thing for that! In the mid afternoon we drove over to my mom's place in San Francisco for a mini reunion with my nephew Ernie, who was here visiting home after his first tour of duty with the Army, deployed overseas to Iraq. Good thing to see him here safe and sound! Apparently 99.9% of his time was spent sitting around. This snapshot of your taxpayer funds at work provided to the reader at no extra charge!

As dinnertime approached, we took our leave and drove over to SFJAZZ, finding a spot only a block from the venue. Life is good when things are this easy! The scene in the lobby was a little disorganized as the early show crowd was just leaving, but being astute, we jumped into the queue as the ushers started to line folks up, then waited another 10 or 15 minutes for them to straighten the chairs and tidy up for the 'Late' show. As Evan was signing autographs and mingling, we greeted him and mentioned how psyched we were to hear him play. “Guess I better go practice!” He replied with a grin, then shook a few more hands before ducking out of sight.

Like other nights, the Leaders Circle had laid claim to many of the prime seats – tonight most of the seats in the first three rows on stage right were on hold, so we opted to claim the aisle side on the fourth row. In retrospect, we ought to have sat in the front on stage left, as the guys who came to sit in front of us were extremely tall and wide, but the sound is good there, so I just closed my eyes. All the better for listening carefully, eh?

Evan was surprisingly loquacious – even perhaps a little too talkative, as more than once I found myself thinking “back to the music”, and the setlist appears rather short, even for a brief set such as offered for most shows in the Henderson Lab. Still, it was good music, and the band covered a lot of ground stylistically, from the ragtime era to bebop and beyond. Kind of like a musical gumbo stew!

Nahum seemed to be a student of Marshall or Evan – he certainly appeared to be taking direction from both of them throughout the show. And while he might have been the junior partner onstage, he certainly had good taste when it came to comping behind the others. I especially appreciated his understated take on Nuages – although he added some flash here and there, he made no obvious attempt at outplaying Django.

That restraint also characterized Marshall's work on the contrabass: subtle flourishes here and there atop a solid rhythmic foundation. I'm pretty sure that I goofed up on the title of his spotlight tune, t05. Evan identified it afterwards, and I said to myself, “hey, I should have recognized that one” – then neglected to sock it into my memory blank, so that when it came time to write the title a few minutes later, I was grasping for smoke. Doh! Gotta pay more attention than that if you want to do thing right! Anyways, after learning a little of his history – replacing Ron Carter in the Miles Davis Quintet? Not too shabby! – I'm darn glad to have made it out tonight. It's good to see all the stars of yesteryear before they fade away.

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!