Jazz

Cécile McLorin Salvant

Thu, Feb 5, 7:30pm, Zellerbach Hall

Hailed as “her generation's most imaginative and thrilling jazz interpreter” (Spin), vocalist and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant is much admired for beguiling projects that bring fresh perspectives to jazz performance through dramatic storytelling, vivid historical context, and daring original composition.

A MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy winner, Salvant is classically trained and steeped in jazz, blues, and Caribbean music, as well as Baroque repertoire and musical theater—an extraordinary musician who also surrounds herself with many of the best and brightest artists on today’s scene.

Somi*

Sat, Feb 21, 8pm, Zellerbach Playhouse

Riveting vocalist and composer Somi Kakoma, known simply as “Somi,” is truly a jazz artist for our globally connected times.

The Midwestern daughter of parents who emigrated from Rwanda and Uganda, she found her musical voice traversing cultural bridges between Africa and the US, weaving Afropop, soul, and jazz into her sumptuous, elegant, deeply grooving body of work. A return to her singer-songwriter roots, the music on her latest release was composed in Lagos, Dakar, Paris, and New York, offering a sonic travelogue that weaves deeply personal storytelling with modern jazz and African sensibilities.

*Cal Performances debut

WATCH: Somi performs Ginger Me Slowly

[Her music is] a party and a history lesson, it’s a manifesto and a poem, it’s a call to dance and think at once”

— PopMatters

Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band*

Fri, Mar 6, 8pm, Zellerbach Playhouse

A truly one-of-a-kind ensemble, the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band celebrates and extends the contributions of Indigenous and Native musicians, composers, and bandleaders throughout the rich history of jazz. Indigenous artists like Russell “Big Chief” Moore, Mildred Bailey, Oscar Pettiford, and Jim Pepper ascended into the limelight as star performers, but many other players were never recognized.

Today Keefe’s dynamic ensemble shines a light on that legacy, featuring a “who’s who” of Indigenous musicians from a range of tribal affiliations across North and South America.

An Illuminations: "Exile & Sanctuary" event.

*Cal Performances debut

Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid

Marc Ribot, *guitar**

Film screening with live music

Sat, Mar 7, 8pm, Zellerbach Playhouse

An iconoclast guitarist and fixture of New York’s downtown music scene for decades, Marc Ribot lends his distinctive musical personality to a live score for a special screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 silent masterpiece, The Kid.

Ribot’s bluesy avant-roots guitar playing defined the sound of Tom Waits’ acclaimed albums of the 1980s and ’90s, and in his own work he has explored the legacy of free jazz hero Albert Ayler, Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez, and Haitian classical composer Frantz Casseus. Ribot channels all these influences as a counterpoint to Chaplin’s slapstick and sentimental story of an abandoned child and his adoptive father.

*Cal Performances debut

[Ribot’s] presence meshed so seamlessly with the film that it seemed almost not to exist on its own…a tour de force”

— The Wall Street Journal

Who would you let score a movie adaptation of your life:

Cécile McLorin Salvant
Somi
Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band
Marc Ribot

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