Jeff Kaliss
Jeff Kaliss has written about opera and other classical forms for the Marin Independent-Journal and The Oakland Tribune. He is based in San Francisco, and also covers jazz, world music, country, rock, film, theater, and other entertainment. The second edition of his authorized biography of Sly & the Family Stone was published by Backbeat Books.
Articles by this Author
Ever since Madeline Olso
Two years ago, the Smithsonian Folkways label and the Aga Khan Music Initiative issued Rainbow, the eighth in their series showcasing the music of Central Asia. This audio-and-DVD release recorded the meeting of a dynamic pair of father-and-daughter singers from Azerbaijan, Alim and Fargana Qasimov, accompanied by an ensemble of ethnic instruments, with the strings of the San Francisco–based Kronos Quartet.
For his eighth annual Pan-Asian Music Festival next month, Jindong Cai, conductor of Stanford University’s symphony orchestra, will be celebrating the music and culture of his native China, as well as of that massive nation’s Asian neighbors, Korea and Japan.
Tickets are $37 a pop to see 28-year-old Joshu
David Sharpe’s shows this Saturday, Jan.
A triple threat over four dates at the end of this month, Pinchas Zukerman will conduct the San Francisco Symphony while also performing in his most familiar role as violinist, in a mostly Mozart program, and on viola in Hindemith’s Trauermusik.
Praise, not punishment
“I’m the only one who’s still there,” declares Daniel Pollack. He’s commenting on his abiding popularity in Russia, the site of his prize-winning appearance in the very first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, in 1958, when he was 23.
“I was a political entity before I was a singer,” Joan Baez told me during our first phone interview, in 2005. Four decades before that, she’d been the defining female musical voice of many movements we were involved with as youths, against racial injustice and the war, for the empowerment of the people. She’d found her own voice and finger-picking guitar style in the coffee shop folk scene in Boston, a few years before I got there.
A journey to Grand Avenue in South San Francisco feels like a trip back to a happier era in American commerce, when going downtown meant meeting folks you know and like doing business with.
Anybody fortunate enough to chat with jazz singer Denise Perrier between her sets, or at any number of other people’s local gigs at which she’s been a welcome and appreciative member of the audience for three decades, will come to a delightful realization: Her speech is as rich and engaging as is her lustrous, vocalizing contralto.
Known for her fearless and forthright performance of contemporary and classic violin repertoire, two-time Grammy winner Hilary Hahn seems equally earnest about all matters touching on her musical life. That extends to the commission project she announced at the beginning of this year, In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores, involving over two dozen contemporary composers, most of them new to the 31-year-old violinist.
Warren Hellman Plants Bluegrass (and much more) in Golden Gate Park
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Celebrity Q&A
September 28, 2011
After a long walk in the wee hours of every workday morning, 77-year-old Warren Hellman returns to his home near the Presidio and practices bluegrass-style banjo in a small upstairs room where he won’t disturb his sleeping spouse, Christina. At the other end of a day spent managing many millions of dollars from the headquarters of Hellman & Friedman at One Maritime Plaza, he' assays another session with the banjo.
Surrounded by eager microphones backstage at Dizzy’s Den, in the middle of this past weekend’s 54th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival, Clint Eastwood, who’d just cohosted a discussion of jazz on film, reminisced about the music that had turned him on as a teen in 1940s Oakland.
Most of the notables involved in what may have been the first-ever jazz-poetry reading of the so-called Beat Generation have passed on into legend.
A Concert Series That Opens a Window to the World (and Your Inner Life)
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Article
September 13, 2011
