Jun 3, 2025 11:25 AM
In Memoriam: Al Foster, 1943–2025
Al Foster, a drummer regarded for his fluency across the bebop, post-bop and funk/fusion lineages of jazz, died May 28…
Donald Harrison led his quartet through an autobiographical concert of the multiple genres that constitute his neoclassical conception.
(Photo: Courtesy Healdsburg Jazz Festival)In curating the 27th Healdsburg Jazz Festival, which transpired June 13–22, Artistic Director Marcus Shelby turned the scale limitations attendant to operating in the upscale wine country village 70 miles north of San Francisco into an asset, treating each concert as a unique event. The end result was a satisfying mix of shows by a cross-generational, gender-diverse cohort predisposed to incorporate the trans-African sources of jazz — and Black American culture writ large — into their 21st century conceptions.
Opening night featured eternally fresh piano grandmaster Kenny Barron, still a road warrior at 82, who transcended an injured right hand to toss off an inspired program with no wasted notes, blending roots of blues and swing with Pan-American and Euro-canon flavors. Joined by his working trio with bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Savannah Harris, both strong listeners, Barron acknowledged the Great American Songbook with an elegant reading of “For Heaven’s Sake,” which he’s recorded three times since the early 1990s, then nodded to Brazil with a flowing exposition of Caetano Veloso’s “Aquele Frevo Axe.” He introduced 25-year-old Tyreek McDole, his Artwork Records label-mate, to sing his bespoke lyric to “Marie Laveau,” the maestro’s slightly ominous tone parallel to the legendary New Orleans conjure woman of that name. Barron tore through “Bud-Like,” a percussive, high-velocity contrafact built on the Afro-Haitian bass line of Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco,” then evoked a ruminative aura apropos to the title of the impressionistic “Rain.” McDole returned, improvising cogent vocalese on Barron’s oft-recorded “Calypso” and animating the lyric of Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” in a voice-piano duo.
About one-tenth of Healdsburg’s population attended a “No Kings” demonstration on Saturday morning. That afternoon, McDole opened a free Juneteenth-adjacent triple-bill in Healdsburg’s public plaza with his strong quintet of under-35s, including pianist Victor Gould, soprano and tenor saxophonist Dylan Band and the excellent drummer Gary Jones III. Casually dapper in a white suit and contrasting black beret, McDole delivered a well-programmed set with the poised showcraft and nuanced phrasing of a mature veteran, enhancing the sheer musicality of his capacious, mellow baritone. The repertoire, culled mostly from his just-dropped debut album, Open Up Your Senses, spanned the ’40s and ’50s (“If You Could See Me Now,” “Umbrella Man,” “Lonely Avenue”), cusp-of-the-’70s inspirations Leon Thomas (“The Sun Song–Precious Energy”) and Alice Coltrane (“Los Cubiyas”), his original lyric to Nicholas Payton’s “The Backward Step” and Payton’s mantra “Jazz Is A Four-Letter Word.”
Next, two-thirds of Tar Baby — pianist Orrin Evans and bassist Eric Revis — with Los Angeles drummer Tina Raymond, whose c.v. includes consequential work with SoCal outcat avatars Bobby Bradford and Vinny Golia, played a kaleidoscopic, no-safety-net set, beginning with a think-as-one rumination on the harmonic ambiguities of Andrew Hill’s “Dusk.” Evans’ unique interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail” began with Revis’ rubato bowing, maneuvered to the customary high-velocity tempo, and gradually decrescendoed to gentle ruminations on the well-tuned piano. Marvin “Smitty” Smith sat in to play Evans’ “Professor Farworthy,” dedicated to his long-ago mentor Ralph Peterson, whose trademark “funk with a limp” groove was right in Smith’s wheelhouse, and then a fiercely swinging blues on which Bay Area tenor hero Howard Wiley — in town to play the post-concert show at Healdsburg’s Elephant in the Room roadhouse — threw down a timbrally evocative, Von Freeman-inspired solo. Evans’ persuasive, demotic reading of Donald Brown’s Juneteenth-appropriate spoken word opus “A Free Man” ended the program.
For the finale, Bay Area-based singer-educator Faye Carol presented the trio plus string quartet format from a forthcoming album. Riding the energy generated by Smith, Bandwagon bassist Taurus Mateen and her pianist-MD Joe Warner, she dove into repertoire ranging from “See See Rider,” “The Joint Is Jumpin’” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” to “Giant Steps.”
On Sunday, Hawaii-born ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro played a sold-out Father’s Day concert at the festival’s primary venue, the spacious courtyard of Bacchus Landing, which houses eight local wineries. On one original piece, Shimabukuro referenced his Japanese heritage, eliciting koto-like textures; on another, he executed a section in one rhythmic signature, looped it, and then improvised against it in another meter. Then he went for house, uncorking a string of flashy, note-perfect variations on pop chestnuts like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You” that elicited cheers and applause from the primarily late-Boomer audience.
Monday night featured the Glide Ensemble and Change Band, whose raw, jazz-inflected gospel sound has been a key component of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church’s social justice mission since 1966, augmented by the Bay Area luminaries Kenny Washington (the singer) and MC-poet RyanNicole. After three instrumentals, Washington took the stage, bowed to the choir behind him and applied his malleable, silken tenor to the lyrics of “Work Song,” “Smile” and “God Bless the Child,” crooning, preaching, vocalese-ing and scatting to deliver the pungent messages. After the choir raised a joyful noise on Ramsey Lewis’ arrangement of the Hawkins Family’s “Oh, Happy Day,” RyanNicole rapped and monologued on three intense texts focused on matters of the moment. The choir concluded with two final songs of praise, showcasing their collective power and the individuality and prowess of several singers.
San Francisco-based harpist Destiny Muhammad’s quintet headlined a Tuesday lunchtime concert on the bucolic, view-to-die-for premises of Overshine Winery, owned by David Drummond, formerly chief legal officer of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and the much-younger brother of bassist Ray Drummond. It was broiling hot and cloudless, but I made it through three of Muhammad’s well-arranged numbers: “All Blues,” “Song For My Father” and a bebop “Rhythm” changes line. Each piece featured strong solos by Muhammad, who traversed an array of attacks and dialects, and by trumpeter Christopher Clarke and saxophonist James Mahone, Shelby’s one-time bandmate in Black Note, the L.A.-based “young lions” group that brought bassist Shelby and drummer Willie Jones III to public attention 30-plus years ago.
On Wednesday evening, Healdsburg’s Rising Star Artist in Residence, 30-ish bassist-composer Amina Scott, performed originals and arrangements with a strong quintet including New Orleans drummer Sean Byers, who propelled the set-opening “Twelve’s It,” by Ellis Marsalis, with an apropos James Black-inspired groove. Scott’s compositions addressed modernist vocabulary from personal angles, built on staunch, shifting bass lines that provoked well-wrought solos from pianist Ian McArdle, saxophonist Jessie Levitt and trumpeter John-Michael Bradford, all West Coast-based, and served as launching pads for her kinetic, highly melodic solo concept on both upright and electric bass.
On June 19, Marcus Shelby’s big band collaborated with Jason Moran on Moran’s year-long Duke Ellington 125th birthday project, reprising a week-long February meeting at SFJAZZ. MSBB began with two Shelby originals (“Fleetwood And Weldy” and “Monk In The City”), Shelby’s spot-on arrangement of Charles Mingus’ “Fables Of Faubus” and Amina Scott’s “Persistence.” Moran presented a sliver of the virtuoso solo Ellington program he’d performed in late January at Healdsburg’s first winter festival. After an arrangement that admixtured “Reflections In D” and “I Got It Bad,” he applied his refined touch to “Melancholia,” and embarked on a slow-building, phantasmagoric arrangement of “Black And Tan Fantasy” that climaxed with polyrhythmic, otherworldly rumbles (think Cecil Taylor meets Conlon Nancarrow) that seemed to emanate from the bowels of the piano, abruptly recalibrating when it was time to return to the stately theme.
The band returned, and rose to the occasion. They addressed with panache the harmonic and textural nuances of “Such Sweet Thunder” and swaggered through “Braggin’ In Brass.” Vocalist Darynn Dean came aboard, simmering on the fervent lyric to “My Heart Sings,” uncorking effervescent scat in her own dialect on “It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” and murmuring wordlessly at the beginning of “Mood Indigo,” on which Patrick Wolff, Wayne Wallace and Mike Olnos addressed the clarinet/muted-trombone/muted-trumpet section with dynamic sensitivity.
On Billy Strayhorn’s “Northern Lights,” Moran created a piano part in response to the dissonant woodwind and brass motifs from the score, first creating overtones on the strings, then counterstating the brass and woodwinds with a free-flowing atonal solo from which he launched an extended, dance-like, appropriately mysterious a cappella improvisation. He emphasized the train song elements of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” gradually accelerating the pace through a climactic, ebullient trumpet-alto saxophone duet (Chris Clarke and Michael Booker) against a cacophonous background before decelerating to a stop at the final, northern destination. After a bracing reading of “Jeep’s Blues,” on which alto saxophonist Tony Peebles channeled the breath control and intonation of the song’s dedicatee, Johnny Hodges, Darryn Dean returned, throwing herself completely into “I Like The Sunrise” from Liberian Suite, maintaining a well-rounded sound at the high and low ends of her formidable range.
On a chilly, blustery Friday, June 20, Dianne Reeves and guitarist Romero Lubambo, her long-time duo partner, overcame the elements for a lovely concert that featured good old good ones from the American and Brazilian songbooks, and Reeves’ autobiographical “Nine,” which she dedicated to her uncle and early mentor, bassist Charles Burrell, who had died earlier in the week at 104.
Saturday night, the summer solstice, featured a crackling double bill of high-level bands led by Allison Miller and Terri Lyne Carrington. Regrettably, I arrived late for Miller’s set with tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover, pianist Orrin Evans and bassist Rhea Butler. As I entered the courtyard, Glover was midway through a volcanic tenor solo, followed by a complex, combustible Evans improvisation and the leader’s web-of-rhythm drum solo. Miller introduced the panoramic finale, “Spottiswood Drive,” as a dedication to a teacher she fondly described as equivalent to the abusive instructor in Whiplash, opening with soft, stately rubato patterns that gradually intensified and evolved into an Afro-triplet structure. Evans and Glover followed her lead in an erudite conversation, ending the dialog when Miller embarked on a consistently interesting concluding solo that encompassed the entire drumkit.
Carrington played her recently issued Max Roach centennial homage, We Insist! 2025 (Candid), with most of the band from the album: co-leader Christie Dashiell, vocals; Morgan Guerin, tenor saxophone and electric and acoustic bass; Milena Casado, trumpet and electronics; Matthew Stevens, guitar; and Christiana Hunte, dancer-spoken word. The program consisted of five recontextualized songs from Roach’s galvanic, prescient summer 1960 recording We Insist! with lyricist Oscar Brown and singer Abbey Lincoln, each addressing a core component of the African-American experience from slavery through the then-expanding Civil Rights movement and contemporaneous freedom struggles in Africa, and five new songs responding to the source album. Apart from “Boom Chick,” a poem-tune titled for a signature phrase that armatured one of Roach’s solo compositions, Carrington, who performed alongside Roach in her early teens and knows his vocabulary inside-out, played only one Roach lick that I could ascertain during the 80-minute set. Instead, she embodied Roach’s oft-stated ethos of intrepid inquiry, creating a constantly morphing polyrhythmic web in response to Hunte’s expressive dancing, Guerin’s deep-in-the-cut grooves and Casado’s Miles Davis/Don Cherry/Graham Haynes-esque sting-like-a-bee jabs and volleys. Dashiell was similarly impressive in capturing the spirit of songs like “Driva Man” and “Freedom Day” while avoiding any mimicry of Abbey Lincoln.
A Sunday matinee at the Paul Mahder Gallery presented Chilean tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana playing “brand new music” with pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Pablo Menares and drummer Kush Abadey. She opened with “Beyond The Blue,” whose several episodes posed shifting environments that complemented her remarkable chops — a full, textured tone through all the registers and lots of precisely calibrated extended techniques — and allowed her space to create fresh, thematically connected melodies throughout her improvisations. Fueled by Abadey, whose ride cymbal sounded like Tony Williams was in the house, the rhythm section unfailingly cosigned her twists and turns, and told their own story when Aldana laid out. Sparks combusted further on the second piece, which opened with a long unaccompanied tenor intro with the logic and complexity of an etude, before a long back-and-forth Aldana-Zaleski passage.
A few hours later at Bacchus Landing, Healdsburg #27 ended with a New Orleans-centric double bill by Donald Harrison and Nicholas Payton, sponsored by Jason Patterson, proprietor of the Crescent City’s Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro. A day before his 65th birthday, Harrison led his tight quartet with pianist Dan Kaufman, bassist Nori Narakoa and drummer Brian Richburg through an autobiographical concert of the multiple genres that constitute his neoclassical conception. He uncorked a string of concise, full-toned alto saxophone improvs, first demonstrating his “nouveau swing” concept on “Jeannine,” then his assimilations, respectively, of Sidney Bechet (“Maple Leaf Rag”), Charlie Parker (“One For Bird”), Miles Davis (“Bye, Bye Blackbird”), John Coltrane (“Impressions”) and Eddie Palmieri (“Temporal”). There followed a soul medley, and then the soaring, self-descriptive “Big Chief Of Congo Square,” signifying the position with the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indian Tribe that Harrison inherited from his father almost 20 years ago. It was a master class from one of the finest of his generation.
Payton joined New Orleans-seasoned funk-masters Nate Edgar on bass and Nikki Glaspie from The Nth Power for an intense, focused program of mostly songs from his Light Wave Suite, all highly melodic, with interesting changes, whose titles (“Infrared,” “Microwave,” “Ultraviolet”) evoke moods that he associates with various manifestations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Payton set the table harmonically and soloed sparsely on keyboard, but didn’t self-accompany his trumpet improvisations, which projected the formidable range, dynamic control, soulfulness and encyclopedic command of the various Black American music food groups that nourish his self-described “postmodern New Orleans music” voice. DB
Foster was truly a drummer to the stars, including Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson.
Jun 3, 2025 11:25 AM
Al Foster, a drummer regarded for his fluency across the bebop, post-bop and funk/fusion lineages of jazz, died May 28…
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