SFJAZZ presents Ethan Iverson Trio featuring Gerald Cleaver & Reuben Rogers
Joe Henderson Lab
SFJAZZ Center, 205 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94102 USA
6:00 PM, Sunday, March 31, 2024

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2024 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2024 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

[6:00 PM] {house introduction; band out; Greetings from EI}

1. [6:01 PM] It's Fine to Decline (Ethan Iverson)
2. [6:13 PM] All the Things You Are (Jerome Kern)
   [6:19 PM] {EI back announcement & pitch for TV work}
3. [6:22 PM] She Won't Forget Me (Ethan Iverson)
   [6:26 PM] {EI pseudo-introduction of the next tune}
4. [6:26 PM] Laura (David Raksin)
5. [6:34 PM] Evidence (Thelonius Monk)
   [6:43 PM] {EI back- & fore-announcements}
6. [6:43 PM] Fire Waltz (Mal Waldron)
7. [6:48 PM] Killing Me Softly with His Song (Charles Fox / Norman Gimbel & Lori Lieberman)
   [6:55 PM] {EI yack about upping his chops}
8. [6:58 PM] Giant Steps (John Coltrane)
   [7:04 PM] {thanks & bow} [7:05 PM] {all done}

• Gerald Cleaver: drums;
• Ethan Iverson: piano;
• Reuben Rogers: contrabass.

Tonight's early show was a fine way to wrap up Easter Sunday. Ethan and the guys put their heart and soul into a solid hour of music, covering a wide span of moods and tempos. The opener, It's Fine to Decline, struck me as the sort of complex, brainy, erudite music that was home base for the Bad Plus repertoire: good stuff when you're up for the challenge of parsing it!

All the Things You Are took me by surprise – I didn't really recognize it until the band capitulated on the head at the end, and even then, I wouldn't have been certain of the title if Ethan hadn't copped to it by making a formal apology to the memory of Jerome Kern.

Laura on the other hand was gorgeously lush and reminded me of my failure to stay on top of the 'gotta watch' list of all time great films, which seems to get longer faster than I can work it down. It's sad to note the parallels between the fictional story of Laura and the real-life experience of Lori Lieberman, and interesting that her Killing Me Softly mines the same emotional vein as the earlier tune.

During Evidence I was reminded of another failure: that of learning what titles are attached to what Monk tunes! Some of them are easy to recognize (for me, it's those where I can imagine singing the title along to the 'classic' defining riff of the tune). Evidence ought to fit that category, but I couldn't recollect the title … three cheers for Ethan making time to fill us all in!

Fire Waltz was a nice buzzer, and seemed to me to be a 'what if' tune – something where Mal Waldron was reacting to Dave Brubeck's Take Five and interpreting it in a fast 6/8 instead of slow 3/4 time. And Giant Steps for the closer? Knock me over with a feather: I was not expecting anything like that tonight, wow! Let's close out Easter Sunday with a grand AMEN!

Big thanks to Ting for the photo gallery!

Whoa! This section is incomplete for now, sorry!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2024 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2024 event list! ☸ On to the next event!