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

Kronos Ventures Through China

Jeff Kaliss - January 4, 2010
David Harrington points out that a lot of musicians don’t “play” music, but that he’s always wanted to have fun with what he does as founder of and violinist with the Kronos Quartet. He spent his New Year’s Eve morning playing a kelp horn and a dripping water drum created by San Francisco composer and performer Cheryl Leonard, and chatting with San Francisco City College student and electronic sou
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Preview

So Percussion Showcases Steve Reich

Jeff Kaliss - December 17, 2009
Working closely with Steve Reich, percussionist Adam Sliwinski realized that the powerful pulse that propels Reich’s music seems embodied by the septuagenarian composer himself.

Triple Play at Café Du Nord

Jeff Kaliss - November 17, 2009
Two things in common among the three acts to be featured at San Francisco’s Café du Nord at the end of November are telegraphed in the hyphen-heavy of the Classical Revolution event: “A Triple-Bill of Post-Classical Composer Ensembles.” But there’s a third, perhaps more revealing element. All three composers — Matt McBane, George Hurd, and Jack Curtis Dubowsky — have written for film.
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Review

An Intimate Bohème From West Bay Opera

Jeff Kaliss - October 19, 2009
Giacomo Puccini often chose settings that brought opera up close and personal, and he thus worked vital changes on the form and made it ready for the 20th century.
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Review

Wild Ride Through Brooklyn

Jeff Kaliss - October 13, 2009

The music of this CD/DVD is easier on the ear than the concept is easy on the mind. But that doesn’t obviate the importance of, and the potential pleasure in, embracing the full intent of the creator, Sufjan Stevens.

An Interview With David Harrington: Forever Deepening Musical Relationships

Jeff Kaliss - September 28, 2009
In his fourth decade as a violinist and as both founder and artistic director of the award-winning Kronos Quartet, David Harrington still exudes the infectious excitement of a gifted student infatuated with experimental and global music from beyond the conservatory’s walls.
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Taking a Fresh Look at Otello

Jeff Kaliss - September 28, 2009
The title of the piece opening Stanford Lively Arts’ 2009-2010 season, aside from its references to Shakespeare’s play of four centuries ago and Verdi’s adaptation (as Otello) to the operatic stage in 1887, denotes a psychopathological rage based on suspected spousal infidelity. There’s a threat, with The Othello Syndrome, that lovers of classical literature and music might be driven into a simila
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Feature

Attuning Your Kids to Music:Lessons From Anne Crowden

Jeff Kaliss - August 18, 2009

Putting kids in tune with music can be a tricky adjustment. When my piano-teacher mother was raising us, there were fewer distractions vying with the sounds of her practicing Schumann and Chopin and the classical programming of WQXR radio.

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Preview

Dead Symphony at the Cabrillo Festival

Jeff Kaliss - July 21, 2009
The music of the Grateful Dead, arguably rock ’n’ roll’s first jam band, is staging a second coming, in symphonic garb, in the land where the band began, 44 years ago. Composer Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6, based on the Dead canon, will be showcased on Aug. 9, the third day of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz.
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Review

Venturing Onto Kronos' Floodplain

Jeff Kaliss - June 22, 2009

There’s so much music, and more, in Kronos’ latest CD that I felt compelled to question the quartet’s founder and violinist David Harrington at his Sunset District base of operations, seeking details and explanations beyond the liner notes. Much of that conversation will be the source of a future artist profile.