On the cultural front, it’s a typically busy week in the Mission and nearby neighborhoods, with dozens of events well worth checking out. Here are a few that caught my attention.
The Red Poppy Art House continues to serve as an outpost for musical experimentation, but Saturday’s program offers a particularly volatile doubleheader with two singular trios, the Supplicants and SticklerPhonics.
The Supplicants — featuring Sameer Gupta on drum kit, tabla and percussion, David Ewell on standup bass, and David Boyce on tenor and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet and percussion — have been associated with the venue for some two decades. But Gupta’s 2008 move to New York City, where he played a central role in launching the Brooklyn Raga Massive underground Indian music scene, made Supplicants gigs rare convergences (saxophonist Richard Howell was a longtime member of the group, too).
Gupta moved back to the East Bay last year, and the trio is getting back to “tapping into that cosmic thing, that Coltrane spiritual vibe,” Gupta said.
The band spontaneously generates material each time it takes the bandstand, rigorously avoiding set themes and forms. It’s a practice the trio established at its initial musical meeting, which turned into the 2001 album “1st Encounter” (Isotope Records). Boyce, it should be noted, has been curating the long-running Friday night music Other Dimensions In Sound series at Medicine For Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery, which continues Jan. 26 when he’ll be joined by Toriwo, Toncau, Ru.
A recent addition to the Bay Area scene, SticklerPhonics is offering a preview of the trio’s debut album, “Technicolor Ghost Parade.” Featuring drummer Scott Amendola, trombonist Danny Lubin-Laden and tenor saxophonist Raffi Garabedian, the East Bay combo plunges into unmediated terrain where there’s no bass and no chords anchoring musical forms. All three players contribute tunes, and SticklerPhonics draws on a continuum of jazz practices, from New Orleans polyphony and ambient soundscapes to funk and free jazz. The trio’s sonic palette extends to the horizon, with tunes inspired by Afrobeat legend Tony Allen, Malian superstar Oumou Sangaré, and various hip hop pioneers.
On the tune “Well Blazed,” Amendola was inspired by D’Angelo drummer Chris “Daddy” Dave and the late producer J. Dilla, “interpreting that feel and time,” he said.
“Normally, I don’t write that way, but I started with groove, and wrote specifically for this group. It’s a through-composed piece that opens to some improv, and playing it live is hard, with the time jumps. It ends with really fast swing and an anthemic brass fanfare, kind of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time meets J. Dilla with a bunch of electronics.”
Sun Ra Arkestra at the Great American Music Hall
Speaking of musical explorers, the original space travelers return to the Bay Area when the Sun Ra Arkestra checks into Great American Music Hall for a three-night residency Feb. 6 to 8. The group, which has been under the leadership of 99-year-old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen since 1995, has thrived in recent years, releasing its first new album in two decades in 2020 and touring widely. The GAMH run is designed to showcase some of the Arkestra’s universe-spanning range, opening with a night of big band swing (a concept both rigorously honored and assiduously deconstructed by the Arkestra). The residency continues Feb. 7 with Outer Space Jazz, and concludes Feb. 8 with The World Is Not A Ghetto.
Jazz is no stranger to ghost bands, ensembles that continue to tour long after the demise of the namesake leader, but the Arkestra thrums to a very different vibe. Pianist, keyboardist, composer and poet Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, and was recognized as an exceptional musical talent in his hometown. Like tenor sax maestro Lester Young, Ra was traumatized by his service in the segregated Army during World War II. Based in Chicago as of 1946, he spent years writing and arranging music and rehearsing stage shows at the Club DeLisa for Fletcher Henderson, whose career had faded since he pioneered big band jazz in the early 1920s.
By the mid-1950s, Ra (who departed Earth on May 30, 1993) had attracted a devoted cadre of musicians who lived communally and spent countless hours rehearsing his intricate music, which made use of extended techniques, dense, lapidary textures and early versions of electric keyboards. The Arkestra often chanted Ra’s poetry, and he treated rehearsals as consciousness-raising sessions, lecturing musicians about his philosophy of life and music for hours at a time (while also giving to koan-like word play– “It ain’t necessarily so that it ain’t necessarily so,” he’d say).
A harbinger of Afrofuturism, Ra claimed the entire universe for Black people while creating a body of music almost as expansive. Allen, who joined the Arkestra in 1958, described him as a guru who used every means to reach his audience. “He was saying back in the 1940s and ‘50s things that came true,” Allen told me in a 2019 interview. “He had to wake the people up by giving them something different. Music is a language, and he uses that to wake them up, open up their eyes and hearts to the new age coming. Somebody has to tell the people what’s happening. We do it through poetry and music.”
