Jesse Hamlin
Jesse Hamlin has written for The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications over the past 30 years on a wide range of music and art, covering jazz musicians and symphonic conductors, sculptors, poets, and architects. He has also written for The New York Times, Art & Auction and Columbia magazines, as well as liner notes for CDs by Stan Getz and Cal Tjader.
Articles by this Author
Improvisation—the spontaneous creation of music—is an ancient art practiced in cultures worldwide. We tend to think of it these days in terms of jazz, where improvisation, the making of melodies in the moment, is an essential element. But there’s a long tradition of spontaneous music making in Baroque and classical music.
Over the last 35 years, Berkeley High School has produced an inordinate number of prominent jazz musicians, among them saxophonist Joshua Redman, trumpeter Steven Bernstein, pianist Benny Green, and multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum. They came up through the city’s exemplary public school jazz program, a districtwide farm system that gets kids swinging in grammar school.
How can you generate more revenue for the arts?
A sea of sun-drenched people flowed along Fillmore Street on Saturday, partaking of the musical and gustatory pleasures — not to mention the beer, wine and margaritas — served up by San Francisco’s biggest street bash. Blues and barbecued oysters. Fried catfish and Nigerian folk songs.
It was impossible to sit still the other night at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage, where John Santos’ Latin-jazz sextet took off on La Rumba Me Lleva (Rumba Carries Me Away), an original tune that lived up to its title. A singing melody shaped by flutists John Calloway and Melecio Magdaluyo, it danced to the syncopated rumba rhythms played on fish crates and other makeshift percussion instruments by 19th-century black Cuban dockworkers.
Why do some of us love listening to sad music, while others loathe it?
In the summer of 1960, Chris Strachwitz was driving through rural Texas, searching for down-home blues musicians to record, when he came across some folks chopping cotton in a field outside Navasota.
In 1993, a year after he’d taken over the directorship of the Carmel Bach Festival, Maestro Bruno Weil tapped the celebrated Baroque and classical violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch to serve as concertmaster for the festival orchestra. The ensemble would never be the same.
