Tickets at Eventbrite or $20 at door. Eight pm show.
An award-winning trombonist, improviser, composer, and educator, Naomi Moon Siegel uses the trombone as a vehicle for sonic expression colored by breath, spit, and physicality. Moving beyond conventional genre norms, she allows her lyrical sound to unfurl intuitively. Her original musical vocabulary draws on the richness of global musical traditions and the sonorities of the natural world. Siegel is touring in support of her third album, Shatter The Glass Sanctuary. Produced by award-winning drummer Allison Miller, Shatter The Glass Sanctuary is an ambitious and sweeping statement, showcasing Siegel’s prowess as a composer, improviser, bandleader, and trombonist. Her ensemble for this tour features Marina Albero (piano) and Christopher Icasiano(drums), luminaries from the Seattle music scene, and the Bay Area’s own Jayla Chee(bass).
Earthwise welcomes a jazz summit with stalwarts of the scenes, in the Bay Area, New York, New Orleans and Seattle: Steven Bernstein, slide trumpet; Wayne Horvitz, piano, and James Singleton, upright bass and pocket trumpet. Performing as: Tricoastal Consortium, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, three nights.
Old friends since way back when, the group performs as a compact trio at Palo Alto Mitchell Park Community Center, El Palo Alto room, which has intermittently served as a music workshop and listening room.
Steven says:
very excited about a new project with Wayne Horvitz and James Singleton.. 2 musicians who share love for the same things I do… groove, melody and mystery.. it’s also my first ever piano trio project.. into the unknown and in residence at Mitchell Park Community Center Palo Alto
Bernstein played an Earthwise show at the Bottom of the Hill San Francisco, Diaspora Suite, in 2008; Horvitz played as a duo with Sara Schoenbeck at The Mitch in May, 2022; Singleton played a residency with Will Bernard and Charles Rumback at The Mitch in June of last year.
Bernstein is based in New York, Horvitz Seattle and Singleton New Orleans. They appear as Tricoastal Consortium.
It’s part of our Palo Alto Public Art collection, and spans two quasi-linked surfaces, the U Building which hosts some artist studios and H, especially H-1 a meeting space where Ron Jones’ infamous “Wave” project took place. The mural is considered “temporary” which I reckon means the artist waived his rights to sue us when the wrecking ball finally comes.
Delbert Anderson a Navajo trumpet player from New Mexico called me on my 60th birthday to say he was stranded at the airport in San Francisco and then both came to my celebration at Chef Chu’s and more to the point hit at Lytton Plaza the next day with Rabiah Kabir and Jonathan Lagunta, for Earthwise
EWP 2Q24 RECAP
Doox of Yale, Christian Beck; January 10, 2024, Palo Alto Art Center
Band of Brothers Levin & La Barbera, Rabia Kabir Trio; January 12, 2024, Palo Alto Art Center.
Delbert Anderson, Rabiah Kabir & Jonathan Bautista Lagunte, January 29, 2024, Lytton Plaza.
Nefesh Mountain, TK, February 9, 2024, Palo Alto Art Center.
Lizzie No, The Sink Head featuring Fumi Okiji, Ben Davis, Ben Goldberg & Jordan Glenn; Beti Masenqo, February 14, 2024, Palo Alto Art Center.
Matt The Electrician, March 24, 2024, Lytton Plaza.
Ethan Iverson, Marta Sanchez, April 1, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Ethan Iverson, Marta Sanchez, April 2, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Marta Sanchez, Motoko Honda Simple Excesses Quartet featuring Cory Wright, Matt Small & Jordan Glenn, April 3, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Marta Sanchez, Dick Fregulia Trio, Dick Conte Trio (w Steve Webber & Jimmy Hobson), April 4, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Myra Melford Ben Goldberg Duo, Marta Sanchez, April 5, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Tammy Hall, Adam Klipple Josh Thurston Milgrom Duo. April 6, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Edward Simon, Tammy Hall (f Leberta Loral), April 7, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Freelance Subversives featuring Will Bernard, Ben Stivers, Eric Kalb, Victor Little & Vicki Randle; Murray Low Rabiah Kabir Duo, April 8, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Earthwise “Latin O Loco “ Showcase at 3rd Thursdays featuring Cien Mil Mangos, Harvey Wainapel ALEGRITUDE, Jack Tuttle and Friends Sullivan Tuttle, Scott Gates, Chad Bowen & Al Mireault; Roberta Donnay Rainforest Trio, Los Panaderos, Midtown Dreamers, April 18, 2024, 3rd Thursdays on California Avenue.
DJ Sep “Dub Mission at Lytton Plaza”, May 4, 2024, Lytton Plaza.
Spaghetti (Jim Campilongo, Scott Amendola, Sam Reider & Matt Muntz), May 10, 2024, Lytton Plaza.
Cien Mil Mangos, May 17, 2024, Johnson Park.
Mark Lettieri Group (featuring Jason JT Thomas, Daniel Porter & Wes Stephenson, Mitchell Park Bowl, May 24, 2024.
Nels Cline Trio featuring Scott Amendola & Phillip Greenlief, May 30, 2024, Mitchell Park Community Center.
Eddie 9V, Jimmy Dewrance Group (f Marvin Greene, Jimmy Mulleniux, Gary Rosen), June 2, 2024, Mitchell Park Bowl.
I have assorted holds and offers pending for summer fall 2024 and project about 40 shows for the year, down from 61 in 2023, an all time mark. Although I also say that having started Earthwise in fall, 1994 that this is my 31st season that’s not quite right since some years I focused on management of acts and artists to the exclusion of producing shows here, and did virtually no work in music the year my mother died and the year before my mother died (0 and 1 shows respectively in 2017 and 2018, which is a very Silicon Valley set of digits, dig it?)
bw STAN vs MLG Rules: the Times reported something about quantitative social media based mass obsession for music — based on an Eminem song but also maybe an acronym — which I compare to the fact that Mark Lettieri I hosted last night at Mitch Bowl has 192K followers on social media platform and then 192 fans turn out for his (homecoming show), a 1::1000 ratio. So I would say the Lettieri Rule is that artists generally have 1 fan in the real world for every 1,000 fans on the internet. (and if you are reading this in the future the internet was a thing that accompanied the massive proliferation of semiconductors, computer devices, handheld computer devices and so-called social media, which created billionaires out of certain millionaires and then nearly killed off Democracy based on disinformation by Fascists and autocrats in foreign lands.
Mark Lettieri Group, free concert, 6 pm, Friday, May 24, Mitchell Park, Palo Alto;
Nels Cline Trio (with Scott Amendola, Phillip Greenlief), 8 pm, Thursday, May 30, Mitchell Park Community Center, $20 advance at EventBrite. By Earthwise Productions
I am hosting two of the greatest guitarists on consecutive weeks; Mark Lettieri plays a free outdoor show at Mitchell Park, Friday, May 24, 2024, from 6 to sunset; Nels Cline trio, with Greenlief and Amendola, fill the void six days later, six hundred yards south by south east, the El Palo Alto Room of the Mitchell Park Community Center in Palo Alto. Twenty dollars plus fees in advance. Two hundred capacity — although truth be told you can get a reasonable approximation of the full show from the courtyard of The Mitch— we are more likely to open the sliding glass walls to accommodate demand than to close them. And as a liberal arts grad from four decades ago I’m hoping to learn something of the guitar works from the double dose or comparison. The interviews from Richmond museum are great. I have the book. A wiki consciousness suggests this info as relevant:
Tone Concepts Goo (distortion) EQD Pitch Bay (pitch shifter) Boss CS3 (compression) EQD Aqueduct (vibrato) Catalinbread Belle Epoch (delay) Neunaber Immerse (reverb) Boss DD3 (delay) A mini white and red pedal i cant identify EQD Special Cranker (overdrive) Boss TU3 (tuner)
I saw James Dolan speak at a music conference in Los Angeles in February. He owns the Knicks and the Rangers, and Madison Square Garden, but was talking about Sphere, a venue in Las Vegas. It’s more than a venue, its a type of venue. It uses millions of LED — light emitting diodes —and thousands of speakers and costs $2.3 billions of dollars to build. He wants to build Sphere(s) out beyond Las Vegas. If you read this, Plastic Alto, and have hundreds of millions of dollars and one hundred acres, call him.*
Meanwhile we have The Guild in Menlo Park, or maybe Guild. They have Ozomatli tonite, Susto played last night; they had Duran Duran recently and a week of Bob Weir. The general contractor told me that 25 billionaires from here put up one million dollars each, for a total fund of $35m, to build Guild. Now there’s a plaque with the names of those donors, upstairs, near the elevator. Actually, I am taking license with the word “billionaire” – -I think of a millionaire as someone with between $20m and $200m outside of their home, and that people with more than $200m assets under management are “billionaires”. People with nothing to about $20m are all in the same boat, more or less, compared to the billionaires and trillionaires; there are no people — yet – with a trillion dollars – just corporations like Apple and Nvidia and Tesla — yet “corporations are people too!” — so it’s confusing.
I started Earthwise if you excuse the digression because I thought that being able to discern good music from noise would help people choose a leader over a despot, and choose war over peace, but now on HBO there is a story about an attractive female Fascist who uses music to manipulate the masses, in a merger of art, entertainment, capital and politics. Oops.
I thought of all this — 316 words above — while watching 10 Stanford students play salsa for about 100 We The Peoples at Johnson Park, by earthwise, under an oak tree. Cien Mil Mangos under thousands of oak leaves.
*I was impressed with James Dolan taking about Sphere. I started to imagine Kent Lockhart the basketball player but also an artist and art teacher being commemorated by having his art translated into or onto Sphere, having his images and shapes projected onto that curved, densely lit, saturated media skin, the way Jessica Yu turned Henry Darger’s drawings into a movie. Kent was once drafted by the Knicks the NBA team owned by Dolan, if that helps the concept move from these pages to Sphere. (And Jessica Yu and Kent were once schoolmates if not friends — she won the Academy Award for short doc — short doc means if Doc Rivers was built like Mugsy Bogues and was a film. In the way that Milt Wagner was not Richard Wagner pronounced “vog” like “dog” and “ner” like “grrr” – the sound a dog makes — and the Warriors auxiliary distaff team is named for an Old Norse concept wall cry eye — like the big eyeball on the sphere or “Naked Eye” by Luscious Jackson not Lucius Jackson, peel me?
Kent promised to send me a lizard he built out of wire and color, maybe based on something he saw on his farm outside Melbourne, the way Oliveira saw hawks over Stanford, to form Windhover. He winged it.
Sphere needs Kent more than Kent needs Sphere, if you ask me or read Plastic Alto – which was named not for the soccer field near Stanford but the little black rubber pebbles that bounced or jumped when the ball hit.
Cien Mil Mangos on May 17, 2024 at Johnson Park: Sofia, vocals; Eva, vocals; Rabiah Kabir, flute; Ryan, trumpet; Andrew, trombone; Ky, bass; Dante, piano; Cefe, congas; Wesley, bongos, cowbell; Elena, timbales.
Cien Mil Mangos, April 18, 2024, 3rd Thursday, California Avenue:
Sofia, vocals; Rabiah Kabir, flute; Jenna, alto; Ryan, trumpet; Gil, trombone; Dante, piano; Ky, bass; Max Yoshimoto, timbales; Sebastian, congas; Austin, bongos. (Note: this is third year for Cien Mil Mangos, a student group that overlaps with but it independent of either Murray Low’s class or SALJE Stanford Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble. When someone graduates, they recruit for more members; as a nod to this dynamic, Murray on piano and Rabiah on flute opened for Will Bernard group at Earthwise at The Mitch last month).
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 