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Community Outreach
OUR SCHOOL PROGRAMS
Reach thousands of students across the Bay Area.
Donate thousands of SFJAZZ Center concert tickets to schools and community groups each year.
Provide students and educators special access to select interactive soundchecks, rehearsals, concerts and professional development workshops.
SFJAZZ SCHOOL PROGRAMS
From field trips to the SFJAZZ Center Auditorium, to hands-on learning in their very own classrooms with jazz professionals, our School Programs give students access to jazz’s critical history.
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SCHOOL DAY CONCERTS
Free performances tailored to students in grades K-12 with leading jazz artists and educators at the SFJAZZ Center’s beautiful Miner Auditorium and direct to public schools (when assemblies resume). Students experience jazz in all its forms, explore how the African Diaspora shaped our musical landscape, participate in a highly interactive environment, and learn how jazz is alive, relevant and continuing to grow today!
JAZZ IN THE MIDDLE
Sends jazz musicians and poets into public middle school classrooms to unlock the history of jazz from a social, historical, and creative perspective.
JAZZ IN SESSION
Collaborates with schools in strengthening existing music instruction programs by making jazz education accessible to the Bay Area public school community.
SFJAZZ POETRY FESTIVAL STUDENT SHOWCASE
SFJAZZ Education welcomes renowned spoken word poets and jazz musicians to celebrate our 3rd annual showcase, celebrating the power of our stories. This program features students from San Francisco and Oakland public middle schools along with a starstudded cadre of teaching artists and professional musicians, for an afternoon of poetry, jazz and community.
SAT–SUN, APR 23–24 • FREE! JOE HENDERSON LAB
SFJAZZ & SFCM
IN PARTNERSHIP
SFJAZZ is proud to partner with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and its Roots, Jazz & American Music (RJAM) program, linking a world-class conservatory to the SFJAZZ Center and its resident all-star ensemble, the SFJAZZ Collective.
STUDENTS $10 | GENERAL $20
JOE HENDERSON LAB
RJAM SIDE-BY-SIDE
Side-by-Side concerts pair select faculty from the Roots, Jazz and American Music (RJAM) program at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music with their young artist proteges. The stellar faculty cast includes the SFJAZZ Collective’s Warren Wolf, David Sánchez, Edward Simon, and Matt Brewer, along with luminaries Joshua Redman, Carmen Bradford, Julian Lage, Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, Matt Wilson and many others.
SUN, FEB 20 • 7:30 pm SUN, APR 24 • 7:30 pm
During his residency at SFJAZZ, Akinmusire will premiere Porter, composed for orchestra and a quartet of young musicians. It’s a tribute to his teacher and other early mentors, including drummer Donald Bailey — the same Donald Bailey who played with organist Jimmy Smith. “Because Mr. Bailey used to have jam sessions every week at the library in North Oakland, and so I’d go and play with him when I was like 15, 16. So many incredible musicians helped me. I mean, I sounded horrible! But they were all about nurturing, about community. And that’s something I’m thinking a lot about this season — about just representing my community. I live in Oakland, so I’m both local and not local. I’m trying to be Ambrose the guy who wins awards and records for Blue Note, but I’m also trying to be just ‘Ambrose from the Bay.’”
When Akinmusire presents Porter at SFJAZZ, he says, the musical spirits of his teachers will be “activated” by the musicians on stage. The community lives, and it grows.
CHRIS POTTER
RESIDENCY: MARCH 17–20, 2022
Reflecting on these past 18 months, the saxophonist describes the “sense of relief” that music gives him. “It always got me — the Beatles when I was six or seven,” he says, thinking about his parents’ record collection in Columbia, S. Carolina. “I memorized every note. And then there was this album my parents had of Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and I did the same thing with that. And then when I started to play” — at age 10 — “I just had that need to communicate, to express something that I couldn’t maybe express in words.”
He remembers recording albums off the radio with his cassette player: “One day they played the whole Queen’s Suite by Duke Ellington, and there was just the richness of the colors, you know, from all the members of the band. And the way it was orchestrated was amazing — the compositional clarity, but also just the jazzness of it, the looseness. It was completely new to me. Each piece had its own feeling, and each member of Duke’s big band had his own sound. And when I heard that, I just fell in love with it.”
Spin forward a few decades. Potter has now composed an evening’s worth of original music for big band — a project that was on his drawing board for several years. “I was always fighting for time to do things,” he explains. “But during the pandemic, I got to slow down and really focus. Because even thinking about getting some large-ensemble music played — that’s a real challenge. And now with this residency, I can actually do it.” While dreaming up projects for his week at SFJAZZ, he says, “I had the feeling that whatever I’d like to propose that I’m excited about, they’d go, ‘Yeah! Great!’ It’s a bit of a ‘kid in a candy store’ feeling. And it’s such a great place to play. I like the sound. I like the people. I like the vibe from the audience. It’s a groove in every way.”
– TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON ANAT COHEN
RESIDENCY: MARCH 24–27, 2022
In March 2020, as the coronavirus spread, the clarinetist left New York and flew to Rio where she could look out her window and see the rocky peak of Corcovado in the distance. “I can hear the birds. It’s very quiet and very lovely,” she said back then. “I just go into the room and close the door and practice the clarinet… But you wonder, how are things ever going to go back to what they were, and what does the future look like?”
Fifteen months later, in June 2021, Cohen visited New York and got her answer. Her friend David Ostwald, the tuba player and leader of the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, was playing in Riverside Park, and Cohen, who has often played with the group, decided to go. She brought her clarinet. “And I joined the band and I have to tell you, it felt totally normal. Jazz is a conversation, and as musicians, we’d been missing that for a long time. But when
I played with David, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I don’t remember how to play with my friends, or how to communicate.’ No, it was a sunny day and we were just playing and delivering positive energy. It felt so obvious — that’s where we belong.”
During the pandemic, she had time to reflect: “What is my message, what is my legacy, what do I want to deliver? How have I been inspired and how do I want to inspire others?” She still worries that the virus might throw another curveball and disrupt what seems to be a return to normalcy. Still, she has been making plans for several of the bands she leads: new repertoire, new albums. Playing in Riverside Park was reassuring: “It felt lovely. And then I was sitting in this beautiful restaurant with friends, and we were drinking caipirinhas and eating Brazilian food, and there were musicians playing, and it just felt so normal.”
SOWETO KINCH
RESIDENCY: MAY 19–22, 2022
Soweto Kinch in the Joe Henderson Lab by Scott Chernis. In the most natural way, Kinch has always been a musical bridge builder. His 2003 debut album sounds something like Bird and Diz meeting Pharcyde. A Life in the Day of B 19: Tales of the Tower Block, from 2006, inter-weaves the stories of three inner-city men with the British saxophonist’s raw fusion of hip-hop and jazz. (B 19 is the zip code of an impoverished neighborhood in Birmingham, Kinch’s hometown.)
Over the years, his projects have grown more expansive, expressive, ambitious. On the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinch — who also raps — premiered The Black Peril, drawing a parallel between the outbreak of the Spanish flu in 1918 and another “virus” that broke out the year after — a wave of anti-Black race riots in Scotland, England, Italy, the United States, and Jamaica. Kinch seemed prescient: Within months of the premiere, the coronavirus emerged, and soon there was a wave of police attacks on Black men and women, setting off international protests. When society faces a crisis — say, a pandemic — it lashes out, finds a scapegoat, Kinch says, “and usually it’s Black people, Asian people, Jewish people, Muslim people.”
His new project is White JuJu, a danceable meditation on a sobering subject: systemic racism, the spell it casts across the centuries, and the way it prevents us “from recognizing our common bonds.” Once again, Kinch — who crafted the piece while quarantined in Birmingham — is building symbolic bridges: between European concert music and jazz, electronica, rap, ragtime, and reggae.
“We’ve been living in a Hollywood action movie, post-apocalyptic,” he says. Enough already. Now it’s time to find “a common thread.”
A staff writer at SFJAZZ, Richard Scheinin is a lifelong journalist. He was the San Jose Mercury News’ classical music and jazz critic for more than a decade and has profiled scores of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa and the Dalai Lama.
4 For more in-depth articles, interviews, and playlists, visit SFJAZZ.ORG/ONTHECORNER
Tasty, approachable, and simple.
Located in the heart of Hayes Valley next to the SFJAZZ Center. B-Side provides a warm and comfortable atmosphere, with a menu designed to be enjoyed in a lounge setting. Curated craft cocktails, focused wine list & modern American food served in a music-focused environment.
REOPENING JANUARY 2022!
4 B-SIDESF.COM
