Jeff Kaliss

Jeff Kaliss has featured and reviewed classical, jazz, rock, and world musics and other entertainment for the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other regional, national, international, and web-based publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, is a published poet, and is the author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone (Backbeat Books) and numerous textbook and encyclopedia entries, album liner notes, and festival program notes.

Articles By This Author

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Preview

Crowdambo at Yoshi's

Jeff Kaliss - April 19, 2010

Take a closer listen, and you’ll realize that the Crowden School in Berkeley isn’t the limited classical academy that you might imagine it to be.

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Review

Chamber Music Chums Prove Artful

Jeff Kaliss - April 12, 2010

“This collaboration is what I’m in it for,” declared the clearly delighted soprano Ann Moss, with a sweeping gesture that took in her fellow performers and the audience at the Noe Valley Ministry on Sunday afternoon.

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Rhapsodic Rock Hits Contra Costa

Jeff Kaliss - April 8, 2010

Decades after its ascension to the glittery throne of Glam Rock, the band Queen continues to resonate loudly in pop culture. You could hear Queen’s imperative Don’t Stop Me Now resonating from the loudspeakers at AT&T Park last week as hoi polloi sought their seats for a preseason skirmish between the San Francisco Giants and the visiting Oakland A’s.

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Feature

Singing the Praises of Talented Teens

Jeff Kaliss - March 23, 2010

Now a senior at San Francisco’s School of the Arts (SOTA), with an eye on college, singer Patricia St. Peter feels as if she grew up with Chanticleer. That 12-voice, Grammy-winning men’s chorus is better-known for reaching back to the repertoire of the Renaissance than for stretching out to the next generation of choristers.

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Feature

Symphonic Youth

Jeff Kaliss - March 9, 2010
Restless adolescents and concerned parents alike, all around the Bay Area, have discovered that a symphony orchestra can be a great place for kids to hang out.
Leo Page-Blau and
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Review

Shooting Freely, and Mostly Hitting the Mark

Jeff Kaliss - February 22, 2010
An infrequently mounted masterpiece, bounteous with beautiful and dramatic passages, and delivered by a cast headed by fine principal voices, forms a strong foundation for edifying opera.
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Good Fences Make Good Music

Jeff Kaliss - February 16, 2010
On tour with the Kronos Quartet and anticipating a phone interview with SFCV, David Harrington found himself thinking about barbed wire fences.
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Ruehr’s Novel ‘Response’ to Cypress’ ‘Call’

Jeff Kaliss - February 1, 2010
For its “Call & Response” program this year, San Francisco’s Cypress String Quartet is returning to a composer friend whom they’d commissioned earlier in the program’s 11-year history. That’s Elena Ruehr, who came out from Boston last month to work with the ensemble on her String Quartet No. 5, premiering at the end of February at Herbst Theatre.
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Tasty Mix From Quarteto Vivace Brasil

Jeff Kaliss - January 19, 2010
Flautist Tadeu Coelho is finding, on his group’s first tour of the U.S., that American musical palates are pleased by a healthy mix of genres. He believes that his fellow Brazilians are endemically suited to serving up eclecticism.

“It has to do with our heritage,” Coelho points out. “We are a very mixed population, from African, European, Japanese, and native Indian.

Play It Again, Steve Reich

Jeff Kaliss - January 11, 2010
In the middle of an extended weekend’s showcase by Stanford Lively Arts, composer Steve Reich sat down in a hotel lobby to talk about his five decades of exploration in the musical outback.