Opening by RIVA
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.”
Support: Dustin Wong
Kiefer is a central figure in the diverse independent music scene of Los Angeles. His sound fuses various modalities of Black American Music, from jazz and R&B to hip-hop and electronic music. Kiefer grew up in San Diego, California, immersed in jazz by his father at a young age, and later experimented with hip-hop-inspired beats in high school. While studying jazz piano at UCLA, Kiefer got his education in beats from attending shows at Low End Theory and collaborating with other artists in the scene.
Support: Salami Rose Joe Louis
British-Brazilan singer-songwriter Liana Flores pairs dream-like vignettes of her intimate world with wistful guitar melodies to get lost in, combining a unique and intoxicating range of stylistic influences from British folk and classic jazz to ‘60s Brazilian bossa nova.
Following the runaway global success of her self-released track ‘rises the moon’, Liana’s debut album ‘Flower of the Soul’, produced by Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Natalia Lafourcade) is a truly transportive debut; an album that is a clear statement of artistic intent. Across its runtime, Flores paints vivid pictures of nature, fantasy, love and loss with her crystalline vocals always ensuring that the listener is placed directly into her world.
Following sold out album release shows in the US and the UK, Liana now embarks on a 28 day tour of the US, UK and Europe this fall.
“Showcases her breathtaking voice over lush, elegant arrangements.” – FADER
“Liana Flores’ soothing voice is as diaphanous as her finger-picked jazz guitar.” – Uproxx
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.”
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.”
“Mark Guiliana, a technical master with a rare sense of musicality, has over the last decade become one of the most influential drummers of his generation.”— JazzTimes
Hailed by the New York Times as “a drummer around whom a cult of admiration has formed,” Mark Guiliana brings the same adventurous spirit, eclectic palette and gift for spontaneous invention to a staggering range of styles. Equally virtuosic playing acoustic jazz, boundary-stretching electronic music, or next-level rock, he’s become a key collaborator with such original sonic thinkers as Brad Mehldau, Meshell Ndegeocello, Donny McCaslin, Matisyahu, and the late, great David Bowie.
Fusing Afro-Cuban roots with jazz, folk and global rhythms in songs about immigration, resistance and love, OKAN takes their name from the word for heart in their Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria. With vocals in Spanish, English and Spanglish, OKAN is led by the Cuban-born violinist and vocalist Elizabeth Rodriguez and percussionist and vocalist Magdelys Savigne, both Grammy and Latin-Grammy nominees.
Alfredo Rodríguez is a GRAMMY-nominated pianist, composer, arranger, and producer. After meeting Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006 and receiving an offer to work together, Alfredo emigrated to the US to pursue his dream of being an internationally acclaimed musician. Over the past decade, Alfredo has gone from a local Cuban artist to a globally recognized GRAMMY nominee with five critically acclaimed releases on tastemaker imprint Mack Avenue Records: Sounds of Space (2011), The Invasion Parade (2014), Tocororo (2016), The Little Dream (2018), and Duologue (2019) with percussionist Pedrito Martinez.
Beyond his accomplishments, Rodriguez’s ability to “play stories” on the keys allows him to connect with his listeners on a deeply personal level. His albums, including The Invasion Parade, Tocororo, and Duologue, reflect his memories of Cuba, his experiences as an immigrant, and his journey of self-discovery through music. He’s been featured by All Things Considered, Downbeat, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal among many others, and performed for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert.
Rodriguez continues to share his music along with his impactful message of perseverance and cross culturalization on an international tour, while sharing a variety of viral social media videos in which he plays well-known compositions in a Cuban timba style.
Read The Program Note
5:30 pm: ArtTalk with Jake Blount: “Inherited Black Futures Shaping Tomorrow Through Ancestral Craft”
A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and the New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from the Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon. Blount’s new album, The New Faith, is a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways (released September 23, 2022). The New Faith is spiritual music, filled with hope for salvation and righteous anger in equal measure. The album manifests our worst fears on the shores of an island in Maine, where Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change. Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason—because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future.
This is Jake Blount’s San Diego premiere.
