A Benefit Concert for the Healdsburg Jazz Festival

Date: Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011
Time: 7pm. One show, two different sets of music
Cost: $25.00
Location: Healdsburg Center for the Arts
130 Plaza St., Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: 707-431-1970

The Guarneri Double Quartet is comprised of the Bay Area’s top creative musicians configuring themselves into two different groups, each with a different repertoire and sound. Each configuration will play a single set during the evening benefit concert.

The first set will be performed by a quartet comprised of  Mario Guarneri on trumpet, Randy Vincent on guitar, John Witalla on bass and Akira Tana on drums, and will feature innovative interpretations of jazz classics and originals. The musicians are passionate about communicating their love of jazz to others, and through their music project the legacy of this great American art form.

During the second half of the evening the format changes to a double-trumpet quartet, as the guitar is replaced with the trumpet of  Erik Jekabson. The four instrumental voices are woven together with intricate artistry, taking the audience along for an unpredictable ride. This group evolves out of the great West Coast jazz tradition of the 1950s and 60s, exemplified by Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Stan Getz.

• Download the full-color PDF poster
• Download the black-and-white PDF flyer

The Guarneri Double Quartet could be called anything from jazz, with some classical and avant-garde influences, to four-part chamber music. Regardless how one chooses to categorize this unique ensemble, what happens when they play together is nothing short of magic.

Their collective mission is to create honest music from the heart, both fun to play and listen to. The level of musicianship displayed by each of these five musicians is so high that they can go in any direction in the blink of an eye, interacting and transmitting their love of music to their audiences.

Members of the Guarneri Double Quartet have performed and recorded with a wide variety of artists, including Sonny Rollins, Zoot Sims, Bobby Hutcherson, Benny Golson, Joe Henderson, The Manhattan Transfer, Billy Childs, Art Farmer, George Cables, James Moody, Lena Horne and Roger Kellaway. They will play two sets, 7 and 8:30 pm, with a refreshment break in between.

Tickets: Are available now online on this page, and at the Healdsburg Center for the Arts during business hours (daily 11am – 5pm). Advance purchase recommended due to limited seating.

The Healdsburg Center for the Arts is located half block east of the Healdsburg Plaza. It is Healdsburg’s non-profit community art center which hosts art exhibits, art classes, and supports art education in area schools.

The Healdsburg Jazz Festival, now in its 13^th year, is an arts and education non-profit dedicated to preserving through education and performance the American musical art form of jazz. 

This is the first concert in a three part series sponsored by the Healdsburg Center for the Arts to benefit the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. The others are as follows:

April 1 — Babatunde Lea Quartet + Special Guest

April 30 — Mansa Musa: Mali Meets Jazz

Thursday, February 3

A Two-Part Benefit
Jazz on the Menu &
Celebration Concert 

Eat to the beat of informal dinner jazz from many of our favorite musicians as they play at several local restaurants in both Healdsburg and Geyserville. What could be better? Participating restaurants will donate 25% of their total proceeds from dinners served on Thursday night, February 3, to the Healdsburg Jazz Festival and its essential Music Education programs.

Each restaurant will have a different duo, trio or quartet of jazz musicians who will also donate their time for this evening’s event. Dinner jazz sets by these musicians will start at 6:15 and 7:30pm. Reservations are recommended.

To make the evening even more memorable, a Celebration Concert will be performed by the SSU Faculty Blue Note Sextet at the Costeaux French Bakery and Café (417 Healdsburg Ave). Tickets are just $20 for the music from 7:30 to 10:30, and include a dessert bar with wine from Forth Vineyards, Sausal Winery and Philip Staley on sale.

Admission: If you’re going to dinner at one of the Jazz on the Menu restaurants, you’ll get a free admission coupon at the restaurant (ask for it with your check). Otherwise, if there’s any room left, tickets are $20 at the door for tonight’s Celebration Concert.

Jazz on the Menu “Dinner Jazz”
Sets at 6:15 and 7:30 at each of the following restaurants.

A Divine Affair
330 Healdsburg Avenue
Healdsburg, CA 95448-4106
(707) 433-1035
An abundance of artisan foods, small production beer and wine and handcrafted local cheeses provide a destination brimming with delicious delights for both experienced foodies and those who seek something exciting and new.  A Divine Affair is divinely dedicated to local cuisine. www.divineaffair.net
Presents
Ken Cook and Trevor Kinsel

Baci Café & Wine Bar
336 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 433-8111
Featuring authentic regional Italian & Mediterranean food, paired with wines from Sonoma, Napa & Italy. This family run café features a wide variety of dishes; from carpaccio, salads, pizza, pasta, risotto to ossobuco, in a casual, family friendly atmosphere.  www.bacicafeandwinebar.com
Susan Sutton, Bill Fouty and David DeMarche

Bistro Ralph
109 Plaza Street, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 433-1380
An upscale bistro on the plaza.  www.bistroralph.com
Steve Moon and Ian Scherer

Catelli’s
21047 Geyserville Ave.
Geyserville, CA 95441
707.857.3471
Siblings Domenica and Nicholas Catelli continue the family tradition of serving delicious food to Geyserville and its surrounding communities since 1936. www.mycatellis.com
Bennett Roth-Newell and John Norris

Dry Creek Kitchen
317 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 431-0330
Charlie Palmer, one of the nation’s leading chefs and owner of the highly acclaimed Aureole in New York City, goes straight to the source—the farmers themselves—for Sonoma County’s premium ingredients and extraordinary wines. Recipes are simple yet elegant, inspired by the seasons. www.hotelhealdsburg.com 
Kai Devitt-Lee, Chris Amberger and Jimmy Gallagher

El Farolito
128 Plaza Street
Healdsburg, CA 95448
(707) 433-2807
El Farolito is  Mexican restaurant and full bar / cantina, located just off the plaza in Healdsburg,  The Margaritas are a must and the atmosphere is lively. Come enjoy our hospitality and great Mexican food! www.elfarolito2000.com.
Bob Affifi, Chuck Sher and Dave MacNab

Ravenous Café and Lounge
420 Center Street, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 431-1302
Ravenous offers an eclectic menu based on the seasons available ingredients. Desserts and breads are made in house. The bar is open late, offering beer on tap from local micro breweries, a nice selection of wines by the glass, cocktails, and specialty liquors. www.theravenous.com
Dick Conte, Steve Webber and Lee Charlton

Restaurant Charcuterie
335 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 431-7213
Restaurant on the Plaza  with /Mediterranean-French Cuisine; extensive local wine list.  www.charcuteriehealdsburg.com
Jim Adams and Don Watanabe duo 

Rustic, Francis’s Favorite
300 Via Archimedes
Geyserville, CA 95441
(707) 857-1485
Drawing on a life that has taken him around the world, Francis Ford Coppola shares his personal pantheon of recipes at  the winery’s full-service restaurant. Set in a Sonoma County-casual atmosphere, Rustic’s menu embraces international as well as traditional Italian dishes, with an emphasis on family-style cooking that features fresh, seasonal ingredients sourced from the property’s organic herb and produce garden. Authentic, Neapolitan-style pizzas are also a specialty. www.franciscoppolawinery.com/visit/dine/rustic
Christian Foley-Beining and Gary Johnson

Spoonbar
219 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 433-7222

Modern Mediterranean flavors meet ingredients grown and produced locally, artisan cocktails and wine. The colorful lively dining room and bar features a long communal table and seating that spills onto the street through wide cantina doors (weather permitting).  www.spoonbar.com
Stephanie Ozer, Randy Vincent, Jim Passarell and Phil Thompson

and don’t miss…

A Celebration Concert
with the SSU Faculty Blue Note Band
7:30 to 10:30pm, Thursday February 3

$20 includes dessert bar, with wine on sale from Forth Vineyards, Sausal Winery and Philip Staley. Tickets available online at www.healdsburgjazzfestival.org and at the door.

Costeaux French Bakery and Café
417 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg
Phone: (707) 433-1913 
Gold Medal sourdough. Breakfast & lunch/catering. Gold Medal Breads/cakes/pastry and cuisine.The SSU Blue Note Band is an outstanding group showcasing the music department faculty from Sonoma State featuring arrangements of jazz instrumental music from the mid 50’s to mid 60’s including compositions by Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham, and Lee Morgan

• John Simon – piano
• Pete Estabrook – Trumpet
• Jordan Wardlaw – Saxophones
• Doug Liebinger – Trombone
• Cliff Hugo – Bass
• Kevin Dillon – Drums

Remember, these are all benefit events for the Healdsburg Jazz Festival and music education.  Enjoy dinner at one of your favorite local restaurants, listen to live jazz, and/or head to the Celebration Concert on Thursday, February 3. See you there!

Trio 3

(oliver lake/ reggie workman/ andrew cyrille)

When: Tuesday, November 3
Where: Flying Goat Café
324 Center Street, Healdsburg
Time: Two Shows 7pm and 9pm
Cost: Tickets, $25.00 (available now)

Healdsburg is once again very fortunate to be able to experience in a very intimate setting an all-star partnership of jazz masters, with the group Trio 3.  In an extremely rare West Coast tour, Reggie Workman, Oliver Lake and Andrew Cyrille will be performing November 3 at the Flying Goat Café in Healdsburg, as part of a tour which includes Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Jazz Festival and Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle.

Trio 3 is a group where music is the leader. The unconventional collaboration of internationally recognized jazz masters, Oliver Lake (multi-reeds), Reggie Workman (bass) and Andrew Cyrille (drums), formed to unify the members’ creative energies and promote a single governing principle: organic improvisation. Everyone is a distinct soloist, but it’s definitely an unadulterated group-based effort. Open to infinite possibilities, Trio 3 mixes and explores different sound colors traversing the whole vocabulary of jazz to take the music toward the future.

Hear samples of their music with this MySpace player. (Please wait for it to load.)

And what a glorious jazz vocabulary they have! Collectively, the group  spans over 130 years of jazz history have playing with playing with pivotal artists of jazz and modern music including John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, Herbie Mann, Art Blakey, The World Saxophone Quartet, Lou Reed, Richard Muhal Abrams, Cecil Taylor and more.

Deeply rooted in tradition, these jazz veterans describe their sound as “futuristic music within the idiomatic continuum of jazz.” Like musical alchemists, Trio 3 boldly carries the music forward spinning 3-dimensional jazz, reconfiguring jazz conventions of compositions, harmony, meter and melody.

Trio 3 is also a band without borders. According to Lake, “None of us assumes the positions of a drummer or of a saxophone player or drummer. We’re one third of a unit that makes music and we’re each capable of taking responsibility at the time that it is needed to make that music. With that in mind and with that kind of mind our music becomes unique.”

As so it is with Trio 3 – leaderless and borderless, freely taking flights of fancy from ragtime to no-time, fiery rapid-fire ostinatos to slow blues and modal vamps, mixing original compositions with traditional jazz, blues, bebop and beyond – with their audiences along for the ride.

» Tickets available now! By phone at 707 433-4644

» More info on the web at TrioThree.com

Title: ”The Big Trio” w/Wayne De La Cruz
Location: Palette Art Café
Link out: Click here
Description: Wayne De La Cruz – Hammond B3 Organ
Paul Bannin – Guitar and Saxophones
Kendrick Freeman – Drums
Date: 2009-03-26

Wayne de la Cruz

A captivating versatile group of dynamic musicians with a repertoire that not only represents the organ trio genre but a full spectrum of jazz and blues.

Title: Benny Barth Trio

Benny Barth

Location: Palette Art Café
Link out: Click here
Description: Randy Vincent – Guitar
Chris Amberger – Bass
Benny Barth – Drums
Date: 2009-03-19

Belated Birthday Party Celebrating Benny’s 80th Birthday which was February 16th. Come and enjoy this jazz legend playing with his long time working trio.

See Benny Barth at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival on Monday, June 1

Title: Eric Muhler Quartet feat. Sheldon Brown
Location: Palette Art Café
Link out: Click here
Description: Eric Muhler – Piano
Sheldon Brown – Saxophones
Michael Wilcox – Bass
Brian Andres – Drums
Date: 2009-03-12

Eric Muhler

Eric Muhler’s chord voicings are his own, his improvisations are full of constant surprises and, although quite aware of the jazz tradition, he sounds unlike any of his predecessors. His writing is fresh and personal, evolving before listeners’ ears and expressing a wide variety of emotions and moods.

Title: BBC Trio with Bob Drew, Bill Fouty & Carl Vast
Location: Palette Art Café
Link out: Click here
Description: Bob Drew – Alto Saxophone
Bill Fouty – Bass
Carl Vast – Guitar
Date: 2009-03-05

The BBC Trio

The BBC Jazz Trio (sax, bass and guitar) plays mainstream jazz, Bossa Nova and swing, emphasizing intuitive ensemble music. Since 1984, the Trio (Bob Drew, Bill Fouty and Carl Vast) has continued to define its style and expand its repertoire, delighting audiences throughout the Bay Area.

Fortissimo! “Ah-go ee-lay ah-go! Ah-go ee-lay ah-go! Ah-go ee-lay ah-go-yah!”

Soon you will hear some 5th grade kids chanting that in a few weeks! In case you don’t know, here is my report on the 2008 OJB:

Operation Jazz Band is one of the key music education programs sponsored by the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. Today was Day 2 of Operation Jazz Band Week, which entails a group of Northern California jazz all-stars breaking down into band sections (percussion, rhythm, vocals, horns) and spending an hour a day in one of the Healdsburg/Geyserville 5th grade classes performing and telling the kids about their instruments, the history of jazz, how a jazz band works, and how many hours they practice a day.

I spent the morning being driver for the leader of Operation Jazz Band, Babatunde Lea. A jazz drummer and percussionist, Babatunde founded Operation Jazz Band with Jessica Felix, artistic director of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, eight years ago. Babatunde has incredible rapport with the kids, animating the African, Latino, and American heritage of jazz for them. They learn about call-and-response, swing, improvisation, and many of the past and current masters of jazz. Babatunde keeps the kids involved, with call-and-response throughout his time, and works in the history of jazz from Africa to America, and music styles from chant to bebop in one hour flat.

In the afternoon I accompanied Art Khu (piano) and Dave Ewell (bass) to Geyserville, where they demonstrated, performed, and talked about the history and role of bass-piano rhythm component so critical to the musical idiom. The kids are uniformly impressed by the size of the acoustic bass, and how cool the electric piano is (no, we aren’t hauling around a baby grand …). Art and Dave reinforce the basics, and introduce the more complex elements of jazz.

Digital camera in hand, I snagged about 40 photos or so, and have posted them into a slide show montage:

This year Operation Jazz Band is Babatude Lea, Drums and Percussion; Dave Ewell, Bass; Art Khu, Piano; Khalil Shaheed, Trumpet; Richard Howell, Saxophone; Angela Wellman, Trombone; Ken French, Keyboards; and Clairdee, Vocals.

The Operation continues all this week, culminating in a free jazz concert for the kids this Friday at the Raven Theater. All of the 5th grade classes come, and the children finally get to see the whole band together, playing songs they’ve heard in pieces throughout the week. The greeting the musicians get as they take to the stage is like the Beatles playing in Shea Stadium in ‘65 – a roar that is heard to Geyserville, easily! Little do they realize that they are hearing literally some of the best jazz musicians in California!

For many kids, this is the only time they will ever hear jazz as a musical performance. Most of them hear it on cartoons, for commercials, background in restaurants, etc., never realizing their American musical heritage is there to explore and enjoy.

Operation Jazz Band happens because of the generosity of those who came to this year’s 10th Annual Healdsburg Jazz Festival Gala. Through the event and auctions, we raised $50,000, which directly supports Operation Jazz Band, Tacuma King’s Percussion, Song, and Dance Workshops – also happening now through the start of the Festival in June – and workshops with the Healdsburg High School Jazz Band. From one that has been privileged to help out with Operation Jazz Band, Tacuma’s class, and listen in on some of the workshops, I can’t fully express how cool it is to see children get turned on by great musicians playing great music. It is something really special, and if you ever get a hankering to volunteer to witness it, just call the Festival office.

But I’m not giving up my slot on the roster anytime soon!

Paul Tincknell, Volunteer