Jim Harrington, Oakland Tribune
Pamela Rose had just finished her final song at a jazz-club gig in Germany when a thought crossed her mind: Her set list had been culled entirely from female composers.
It wasn't premeditated. The San Francisco jazz-blues performer had simply picked songs she enjoyed singing -- and they all turned out to be tunes written by women. She didn't think much of the coincidence, until she shared it with the crowd.
"I got this huge response, which actually quite surprised me," Rose recalls of the 2008 show.
The audience reaction was enough to make Rose believe she had happened upon something special. The idea eventually blossomed into her vastly popular "Wild Women of Song" show, which she'll perform as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Saturday at the Herbst Theatre.
The multimedia experience is equal parts concert and history lesson.
Rose and her talented band -- which, for the SFJazz gig, consists of saxophonist Kristen Strom, pianist Tammy Hall, guitarist Jeff Massanari, bassist John Shifflett, drummer Allison Miller and guest vocalist Denise Perrier -- perform jazz and blues tunes hailing from what Rose calls "the Golden Era of jazz, which went from approximately 1920 to 1950."
The music is accompanied by a slideshow of pictures of the songwriters and a script that provides details of the composers' lives. The result is something far more meaningful than just a pleasant evening of music.
"It's likeputting on a play," Rose says. "We are sort of reconstructing this era for people."
First, however, she had to reconstruct it for herself. Rose freely admits that she initially knew very little about some of the songwriters she wanted to focus on. She was familiar with some of the bigger names, such as Ida Cox, Dorothy Fields and Peggy Lee, but there were others she'd never heard of -- even though she'd known their songs for years.
Rose had her work cut out for her. Fortunately, she doesn't mind research, especially when it unearths incredible tales of some of popular music's most sorely neglected figures.
"I used to be a literature major at UC Berkeley," she says. "I'm fascinated with a well-told story."
"I was so moved by some of their stories," she adds.
That's evident on "Wild Women of Song: Great Gal Composers of the Jazz Era," the 2009 CD that arose from Rose's passion for the subject. The album features Rose covering songs by Kay Swift, Doris Fisher, Bernice Petkere, Maria Grever and many others.
The show routinely draws rave reviews from fans and critics. Notably, her set at this year's Monterey Jazz Festival -- an event that also featured such heavyweights as Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Hiromi, Poncho Sanchez and Joshua Redman -- certainly had people buzzing.
"I was a little bit nervous," Rose remarks of performing at Monterey. "It's a big deal."
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