When Other Minds scheduled a stunning roster of jazz-influenced improvisers for Moment’s Notice, the San Francisco organization’s main new-music festival in 2020, all of the last-minute decision-making was supposed to take place on stage.
However, instead of displaying elite musicians performing spontaneous creations, Harry Bernstein became trapped in a Groundhog Day nightmare, rescheduling the festival again and over as the virus spread.
He’s watching every twitch in the COVID-19 trackers, but the signs are good for the music series, which will take place at the War Memorial Veterans Building’s fourth-floor Taube Atrium Theater from Thursday to Sunday.
COVID travel limitations from Europe and health concerns remained even after Other Minds agreed on the latest dates. The East Bay combo of saxophone Larry Ochs and drummer Donald Robinson stepped in on Oct. 16 for trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s multimedia piece Meditations and Reflections on Monk, ensuring that the festival’s cutting-edge offerings stayed fresh.
Saturday’s lineup includes 81-year-old saxophonist, composer, and sound explorer Roscoe Mitchell, who performs with a triumvirate he calls Trio Five, continuing the festival’s long-standing partnership with Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
The festival features a series of intriguing bills in addition to Saturday’s program that bring together strikingly individual and deeply interconnected artists from the amorphous, undefinable realm where free improvised music converges with various avant-garde jazz idioms, focusing on luminaries from the amorphous, undefinable realm where free improvised music converges with various avant-garde jazz idioms. With an intrepid spirit and keen melodic inventiveness, the players shape the musical terrain in real time, frequently without a road map.
Conveyance Media is live-streaming the whole festival, giving a global audience a behind-the-scenes look at the music with intermission features including longtime jazz critic Nate Chinen, editorial director of WBGO, a public radio jazz station in New Jersey.
Mitchell’s AACM colleague and fellow National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Anthony Braxton, who, at 76, is likewise in the midst of an incredibly productive late-career run, headlines the festival’s last day. The show begins with a duo performance by pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson, who was already a frighteningly prolific artist before receiving a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship.
The singular New York multilingual soprano, multi-instrumentalist, and performance artist Jen Shyu, whose solo piece “Nine Doors” finishes the festival’s inaugural program on its opening night, illustrates the vital area that Other Minds occupies.
“Nine Doors’ ‘ is a ritual, a reduced form of a bigger work inspired by the death of her friend Sri Joko Raharjo, a maestro of Javanese shadow puppetry. Song, dance, chant, Taiwanese moon lute, Korean zither and sori buk drum, Japanese biwa, piano, and Timorese and Korean gongs are all part of her theatrical form.
The Sky Is Trembling, a performance by William Parker on bass, flutes, and brass, and Hamid Drake on percussion and voice, is featured extensively in the program on Friday, Oct. 15. Nicholson developed and directs the Vision Festival, which has been New York’s premier free improv showcase since 1996, according to Parker.
Many of their undertakings are imbued with the same idealism and world-building spirit.
