When it comes to jazz and new
music, the Bay Area is a medium-sized pond that sustains a dazzling array of
small, often intermingled scenes. It’s an ecosystem in which a tropical
profusion of players has found a niche, and among the most versatile and gifted
is reed master Sheldon Brown, who is equally accomplished on an array of
clarinets and saxophones.
The Eureka native moved down to San Francisco in 1979,
and he’s been turning up in some of the region’s most interesting ensembles
ever since, from Club Foot Orchestra, which revived the art of composing and
performing scores for silent films, to Berkeley’s Klezmorim, the band that
helped spark the revival of Ashkenazi Jewry’s party music.
He’s toured and
recorded widely with Cuban pianist Omar Sosa’s expansive ensemble. And he’s
played a key role in Clarinet Thing, the all-clarinet ensemble led by Beth
Custer, and Hemispheres, a world jazz combo led by percussionist Ian Dogole.
Brown even finds time to lead several groups of his
own, and on Saturday he presents a project devoted to the extraordinary
compositions of pianist Herbie Nichols at the Hillside Club.
Responsible for the composition “Lady Sings the
Blues,” a tune indelibly linked to Billie Holiday, Nichols became jazz’s
quintessential overlooked genius. While he recorded several classic trio
sessions for Blue Note, he scuffled for work until his death from leukemia in
1963 at the age of 44. Combining his love of modernist composers like Satie and
Bartok with Caribbean inflections and bebop’s hurtling tempos, tunes like
“House Party Starting,” “The Gig,” and “Shuffle Montgomery” have entranced
subsequent jazz generations.
For
Brown, Nichols’ music has provided endless inspiration, and over the course of
a decade he ended up transcribing every tune the pianist ever recorded. He
notes that while Nichols was profiled as a hard-luck case in A.B. Spellman’s
classic book “Four Lives in the Bebop Business,” he should be remembered for
his musical achievements rather than canonized as an abused master.
“Nichols is like St. Jude for all those cats who
didn’t make it,” says Brown, a longtime Oakland resident. “There is that aspect
to his story, but I wouldn’t want that to be the take away. The music is just
brilliant. When I was in my transcribing fever, playing through his tunes a
lot, I really got to know his completely unique voice.
He
was a melodic improviser. He uses the melody of the piece in his solos, which
distinguishes him from great players who apply their ideas to any tune. There’s
elegance and humor is his music, but definitely tempered by a little bit of
melancholy.” - http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/11/17/sheldon-brown-to-honor-overlooked-genius-herbie-nichols/
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