The last time Mission District icon La Doña released an EP, she was on the cusp of a national breakthrough. While 2020’s “AlgoNuevo” introduced her incantatory “femmeton” blend of cumbia, reggaetón, and R&B to a wider audience, an extensive tour with her band ended up being preempted by the pandemic. Released last week, her new single, “Paloma No Vuelve Amar,” picks up where “AlgoNuevo” left off, grabbing attention with a sound that’s sensuous and inviting, forthright and commanding.
The song has received a burst of attention, landing just after President Barack Obama included her tune “Penas Con Pan” on his widely watched summer playlist. The track is from her upcoming EP, “Can’t Eat Clout,” which is slated for release Sept. 15. It’s not a song cycle, but the project describes the uplifting trajectory of a young artist coming to embrace herself, her lover and her art, drawing on the Latin music idioms that Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea has accumulated since she was a child playing community events around the Mission with her parents and older sister in La Familia Peña-Govea. La Doña plays an early set Friday on the Lands End Stage at the sold-out Outside Lands festival.
Speaking of La Doña and the fabulous creative team surrounding her, congratulations to second-generation sign-painter and artist Lauren D’Amato, who was just tapped by the Headlands Center for the Arts for the 2023-24 Tournesol Award, “which recognizes an emerging Bay Area painter in support of establishing and maintaining a career in the region.” The award includes a $10,000 stipend, a private studio, and a culminating exhibition or project of the artist’s choice. Mission Local covered her solo show at House of Seiko in March, and you can watch her in action on La Doña’s irresistible “Dembow y Sexo (Visualizer).”
Music and activism have been inextricably entwined for San Francisco pianist/composer Jon Jang since the beginning of his career. A co-founder of Asian Improv, the record label and arts organization that’s been a primary vehicle for the Asian-American jazz movement, he’s developed an arresting repertoire drawing on traditional Chinese melodies and adventurous post-bop improvisation.
Jang presents “Civil Wrongs: Music about Black American & Japanese American Incarceration” Thursday at Sha’ar Zahav. Produced by the Community Music Center as part of a series showcasing the organization’s faculty, the free concert commemorates the 35th anniversary of the signing of the federal law granting reparations to Japanese Americans wrongly incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. Featuring Erika Oba on flute, Gary Brown on double bass, and drummer Deszon Claiborne, who’s also on the CMC faculty, the program includes Jang’s 1987 composition “Reparations Now!,” which he wrote in tribute to the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations for Japanese Americans.
The program also features “Meditations on Integration,” an extended work that Charles Mingus wrote in 1964 in response to a newspaper article about detention camps being built to hold protestors fighting segregation. Mingus recorded the piece several times under various names, including as “Meditation (For a Pair of Wire Cutters)” on the live album recorded in North Beach in 1964, “Right Now: Live at the Jazz Workshop.”
“This version is based on the Town Hall recording, a work introduced to me by James Newton,” Jang said, referring to the eminent flutist and composer with whom he worked widely in the 1980s and ‘90s. “We performed as a duo at anti-apartheid events and were ultimately invited to perform at the Arts Alive Festival in Johannesburg right after the election in 1994. The energy was electrifying. We played with two Black South African musicians in the rhythm section, and what was really moving was that they had not been allowed to perform in Johannesburg under.”
Reed maestro Sheldon Brown, who’s been busy recently touring with Cuban pianist Omar Sosa and Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring The Wolfpack, plays a duo show Thursday Aug. 10 at the Red Poppy Art House with guitarist Scott Foster, renewing a collaboration that dates back some 25 years. The concert is presented by Jazz In the Neighborhood, an organization dedicated to getting fair wages for musicians.
Jazz at the Make Out Room returns on Tuesday Aug. 15 with the protean duo of drummer Scott Amendola and saxophonist Phillip Greenlief, offering a preview of their upcoming album “Stay With It” on Clean Feed Records. Pianist Motoko Honda, a pianist and composer who combines a wry sense of humor with a knack for startling harmonies, plays a solo opening set.
Don Malcolm has been plumbing the cinematic shadows for the past decade at The Roxie, and he shows no signs of exhausting the darkness. Kicking off Sunday afternoon, A Rare Noir Is Good to Find offers a double bill, pairing the classic 1950 Mexican “cabareteraAventurera (The Adventuress)” with 1964’s “La muerte siba un blues (Death Whistles the Blues),” about a nightclub singer working undercover at a Caribbean casino. The series runs through Aug. 20.
Congrats to all the artists.
I miss SUB/Mission.
A far gone and mostly forgotten space where kids could thrash it out.
SF building code gangsters and the greedy landlord teamed up.
Now there’s nothin’ but tag canvas.
La Dona y Espooky Orb!!! Well deserved