SFJazz Collective - COLLECTIVE IMAGERY (2025)

SFJAZZ proudly releases "Collective Imagery", by the 2024-25 edition of SF Jazz Collective, the distinguished organization’s flagship group since it launched in 2004 with a mandate that, annually, each band member create a fresh arrangement of works by a modern master and a newly commissioned piece. On Collective Imagery, for the first time, SFJC eschews arrangements and presents a program of entirely original music, upholding a remark by its first putative leader and musical director, Joshua Redman, that it is “a true composer’s collective.”

Collective Imagery is the end result of a project undertaken in collaboration with San Francisco’s de Young Museum, which in May 2024 invited saxophonists Chris Potter and David Sánchez, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, vibraphonist Warren Wolf, pianist Edward Simon, bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Kendrick Scott, to view a collection of pieces by contemporary Bay Area artists and choose a work to serve as a springboard from which to compose. Entering their third season as a unit, each master responded with compositions that reflect a multiplicity of visions as diverse as their backgrounds, and yet alchemically coalesce into one grand view that bears out jazz scholar Ben Ratliff’s 2011 comment that SFJC is “a super-brain for what serious jazz sounds like now.”

“It’s very rewarding to hear a group of extremely strong, individualistic musicians find a common language,” says Potter, the Collective’s current music director. “Each person’s choice and the music they came up with was extremely personal.” Simon, a SFJC member since 2010, says: “It’s been tremendously inspiring to able to write for some of the truly top players on the scene, knowing that you can write anything, without limitations, and they will figure out a way to make it work and sound better than I initially envisioned.”

For his two contributions, “Guardian of the Oceans” and “Guardian of the Forest,” Simon focused on India-born American Rupy C. Tut’s triptych painting “New Normal”, portraying the respective guardians – her grandmothers – facing a central depiction of a ring of fire rendered in layers of yellow and orange, that evokes, literally, the omnipresent wildfires that afflict the California community, and, figuratively, “the increasing otherness and separation in society.” The former piece builds from solo piano to full-blown fanfare, spurred midway by a galvanic bass clarinet (Potter)-piano duo; the latter develops the same piano refrain, modulating it from one key to another, leaving room for each member to comment with a brief solo of high intention.

Wolf’s “The Files” responds to Oakland-based Sadie Barnette’s “FBI Drawings: Legal Ritual,” a collage on which the artist overlays blown-up images of pages from the FBI dossier on her father, a Black Panther, with powdered graphite and colored pencil. Wolf then “extracted segments from multiple interviews and wove them into a narrative, delivering approximately 80 percent of the song’s content through spoken word.” In consideration of the period in question, he “infuses the second half of the song with a 1970s retro aesthetic, reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield’s style.”

Rodriguez found himself captivated by “Walking in rainbow rain” by Clare Rojas, a study in grays depicting a female figure walking behind a small bird in the left hand corner. “I wanted my melody to convey the symbolism of the bird that is able to take off and not conform to the norms of society,” says Rodriguez, whose clarion trumpet solo embodies the sentiment of “bringing a sound of hope and freedom, trying to tie all that in.” Potter’s “Unknow Know with What is 12,” which leads off the album, signifies on a “colorful, swirling, quite abstract” work by Chris Johanson with “major keys that change frequently in that swirly way,” and an “off-kilter” 11/8 time signature that spurs his full-bodied tenor solo and Wolf’s crisp, elegant vibraphone variations, before Scott’s dynamically nuanced drumset wind-down.

Brewer’s “Te Quiero Inti”, Sánchez’s “Listo” and Scott’s “The Child Opens Its Eyes to the Earth” are equally successful, conceived and executed at a high level of intention and emotional projection. “Everyone is a leader of known bands, which changes the group’s dynamic and keeps it evolving,” Simon remarks. “Chris and David and I experienced the music very differently when we were in New York in the late ’80s and early ’90s than the younger guys. Having both older and younger members keeps it fresh and connected to the music’s history.” “The septet formation is much smaller than a big band, so you can hear everyone’s personality, but with more orchestrational possibilities than a typical small jazz group,” Potter adds. “There’s room for unexpected things to happen.”

The democratic ethos of having each ensemble member serve the composer is foundational to the communitarian spirit that SFJC has maintained through its various configurations during the past 21 years. It’s one reason why, as Simon observes, “musicians around the world know our work and are inspired by the highly sophisticated writing the band has been able to accomplish because of the special circumstances and resources available to us.”

That ethos also facilitates the band’s ability to animate in notes and tones the core issues under consideration by the artistic community whose respective visions inspired the songs in question on Collective Imagery.

“We jazz musicians are also thinking about many of these same issues,” Potter says. “I think there’s no way to avoid that the arts has to reflect a feeling of empathy and compassion for everyone, and that it matters when things are unjust, and that it’s important, when things are true, to go, ‘Hey, wait a minute; this is what’s actually true.’ That’s reflected in the art that we chose – and among ourselves we certainly talk about how to try and emanate some kind of good energy that will hopefully help in some small way through our music.”

Chris Potter, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet
Michael Rodriguez, trumpet, flugelhorn
David Sanchez, tenor saxophone, congas
Edward Simon, piano, electric piano
Warren Wolf, vibraphone, marimba
Kendrick Scott, drums
Matt Brewer, bass, guitar (track 6)
Cava Menzies, vocals (track 4)