Following a highly successful performance at the Birch Aquarium in May 2024, co-presented by Art of Elan and ArtPower, the internationally renowned JACK Quartet returns to San Diego with an exciting program that features the world premiere of a new work by UC San Diego (UCSD) faculty member and composer, Rand Steiger, as well as “Three Imaginary Chansons” by Juri Seo. This one-night-only special event will take place in the acoustically superb Conrad Prebys Concert Hall on campus at UCSD and will offer a chance to meet the composer and musicians immediately following the performance.
The echo-bathed pop songs of Fazerdaze are the creation of New Zealand indie songwriter Amelia Murray. After building a following with short-form releases and international touring, the project’s daydreamy full-length debut, Morningside, appeared in 2017. Following a five-year gap between releases, the fuzz-injected, ’90s-inspired EP Break! saw release in 2022. (via AllMusic)
Born in Oklahoma, raised in Paris, living in New York City, assistant to a Nobel Prize Winner, licensed New York City tour guide and Murder Mystery business owner, JW Francis is one of the newest signings to Sunday Best Recordings. His brand of lo-fi, utterly irresistible bedroom dream-pop takes its lead from the city JW lives in, with echoes of Jonathan Richman, The Velvet Underground and the lo-fi sound New York has been inspiring for decades.
Following a string of singles, New York’s very own JW Francis finally releases his sophomore album WANDERKID on Sunday Best Recordings. The LP is the follow up to his critically acclaimed debut We Share a Similar Joy, which saw JW firmly mark himself out as New York’s next lo-fi legend gaining mass support from BBC 6Music, Apple Music, Spotify, DIY, The Line of Best Fit, The Independent, HMV, Wonderland, and many others.
Jaguar Sun is a Canadian solo project created by multi instrumentalist Chris Minielly. Weaving together inspiration from bands such as Frightened Rabbit, Youth Lagoon, and Fruit Bats, Minielly creates dreamy, pop centric soundscapes with experimental and folky flair produced entirely in his home. The Ontario based artist allows his instruments to speak equally to his voice urging listeners to get lost in richly layered guitar lines and deep droning synths between soft vocal melodies.
Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions. He previously released four critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD, Go Get Ice Cream,Listen to Jazz, Shades of Flu and Shades of Flu 2. On ANIMALS, his Warp Records debut, Kassa pushes his kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Virtuoso musos appear alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and Shabazz Palaces. Top-flight jazz improvisation weaves in and out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff. The album’s diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula, Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer.
ANIMALS pushes Kassa’s message further too, the title a loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer and as a black man in America. ANIMALS is the sound of an artist aware of the cost of embodying one’s natural self in the public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to perform one’s freedom for an audience can mean succumbing to life inside a cage.
RIVA is a saxophonist and composer, known to juxtapose the jazz idiom with modern beat culture, techno, house, disco, through a fully improvisational danceable electronic jazz show.
“Over the course of the last two decades, Xiu Xiu’s prolific and influential output of acclaimed albums and collaborations has been consistently dazzling. They’ve released multiple full-length LPs that have been praised in outlets such as The New Yorker, The Wire, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, NME and many others. They have toured the globe relentlessly, performing in places as far off the beaten path as Kazakhstan and Lebanon and places institutionally vital as the Guggenheim and Centre Pompidou.
On Xiu Xiu’s latest album, 13″” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart deliver some of the band’s most compelling and mesmerizing music to date. Mixed by John Congleton (Chelsea Wolfe, Swans, Lana Del Rey) this album is unlike anything the band has ever recorded previously and was motivated by the destruction of previous aesthetic notions, as well as the band’s recent move from Los Angeles to Berlin.”
Get ready to sing, dance, and relive Selena’s concert. Anything for Salinas Band brings an incredible show to all of Selena’s fans—dedicating every song to the late Queen of TexMex, Selena. Formed by Karol Posadas and her family members, Anything for Salinas Band perform a show full of Selena’s top hits that will have you singing and dancing all night long.
With La Jolla Symphony & Chorus and San Diego Children’s Choir
“O’Donovan is in a league all her own—her harmonic and rhythmic inventions make for post-folk ear candy.”—Nashville Scene
“There’s a…march to the blossoming of her catalog and her artistry and it’s on full display on All My Friends.”—The Bluegrass Situation
“vocalist of unerring instinct”—New York Times
Multi-GRAMMY winner Aoife O’Donovan will perform songs from her new album All My Friends, a poignant celebration of democracy and womanhood. The album’s nine tracks are deeply inspired by the passage of the 19th Amendment and the evolving fight for women’s rights in America over the last century.
Co-curated by La Jolla Symphony and Chorus Artistic Director Sameer Patel, the concert will also honor the trailblazing voices of Florence Price and Ethel Smyth. Their powerful compositions echo through time, a testament to the strength and brilliance of women in classical music. The program will include Price’s “Calvary” from Five Folksongs and Smyth’s March of the Women. The evening concludes with “America, Come” from Aoife O’Donovan’s Age of Apathy album. The song cycle—inspired by the lives and letters of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in a musical exploration of voting rights for women during the 1920’s—is an unforgettable musical tapestry about the women heroes.
This concert is a stirring tribute to history, activism, and the power of music. Don’t miss it!
From his beginnings as one of Chicago’s most thrilling young trumpeters, to his current status as an internationally renowned musician, composer and bandleader, Marquis Hill has worked tirelessly to break down the barriers that divide musical genres. Contemporary and classic jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house, neo-soul—to Hill, they’re all essential elements of the profound African-American creative heritage he’s a part of. “It all comes from the same tree,” he says. “They simply blossomed from different branches.”
That mission to bring styles together, complemented by Hill’s absolute mastery of his instrument, is a through line connecting his many achievements. It can be heard on his latest album, Modern Flows Vol. II, with its seamless blend of jazz interplay, hip-hop-infused rhythms and socially conscious spoken-word. It’s integral to The Way We Play, his Concord Jazz debut from 2016, where Hill and his musicians reinvent jazz standards using their generation’s wide- ranging influences. It marks the four records Hill self-released before November of 2014, when he won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz competition and became a presence on the global scene virtually overnight. And it defines the revelatory live dates by Hill’s longtime working group, the Blacktet, which the Chicago Tribune called “a remarkably polished, immensely attractive ensemble.”
Today, Hill maintains a nonstop touring schedule with the Blacktet, and the intensely interactive, utterly unique band has become a kind of graduate school for next-level talent—Hill included.“One of the most beautiful things about leading a group is the flow of knowledge and energy that we bounce off of one another,” he says. “Each member contributing their distinctive voice is what truly makes the music and magic happen.”
“Roomful of Teeth is revolutionizing choral music.”—New Yorker
Roomful of Teeth is a two-time GRAMMY Award-winning ensemble dedicated to the performance of new works for eight amplified voices. Through collaboration, commissioning, and new technologies, they seek to reimagine the expressive potential of the human voice.
Their latest album, Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023) was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th GRAMMY Awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Rough Magic; and composer William Brittelle’s work Psychedelics, which appears on the album, was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
ArtPower is excited to present one of the most exciting artists in the international jazz community: pianist, composer, bandleader, and Blue Note recording artist Nduduzo Makhathini. With a range of musical and cultural influences—including Zulu rituals and the church—“Makhathini’s visionary character becomes more fascinating with each new endeavor”—DownBeat
Since making his international debut for Blue Note in 2020 with Modes of Communication: Letters From the Underworlds, the South African pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini has earned widespread acclaim for the genuinely spiritual transcendence of his music. For Makhathini, a Zulu healer and educator who has delved deeply into the histories and traditions of his ancestors, improvised music has never been merely about aesthetics or idioms. As the New York Times put it when naming Modes of Communication one of the Best Jazz Albums of 2020: “In a moment when spiritual jazz has become a dangerously buzzy concept, trust a musician who has truly devoted his life to divination practices.”
