Dina Maccabee

Tango No. 9

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PREVIEW Entertain whatever stereotypes you will about tango as a relic of an openly macho era: tango in San Francisco is alive. Okay, and kicking.

You might envision a wacky, tacky ballroom competition — but not so rapido says Tango No. 9’s founder and violinist Catharine Clune, whose explorations over the last decade have unearthed what she calls "the many faces of tango." With trombonist Greg Stephens, pianist Joshua Raoul Brody, accordionist Isabel Douglass, and newest member Zoltan Lundy singing the Argentine blues, Tango No. 9 revels in tango’s many approaches to music, to dancing, and to life. And it’s not alone. "There’s an underground squadron of tango dancers, ranging from their 20s to their 60s," Clune says. "You can dance tango every night in the Bay Area. It’s in these crazy little back rooms you didn’t know existed, and that’s where we’ve practiced our chops." As social dancing, which she notes hasn’t been a mainstream American cultural movement since the ’50s, tango is "something people seem to want."

Professional dancers will be on hand at Noe Valley Ministry to perform the sultry moves, but if you only ogle los bailarines, you’ll miss half the fun, or half the pain. "If you can lose anything, from a horse race to a heart, they talk about it," Clune says of the moving and theatrical side of tango’s songs — for listening, not just getting down at the local milonga. In a set that traverses the genre, from its roots to the obscure late works of Astor Piazzola, the group performs the first "sentimental" tango, Carlos Gardel’s inspirational rendition of Pascual Contursi and Samuel Castriota’s "Mi Noche Triste," which set fire to an international phenomenon mourning lost love and tragedy. Like, Lundy says, "being left by a woman who was also your prostitute."

TANGO NO. 9 Sat/2, 8:15 p.m., $16-$18. Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF. (415) 282-2317. www.tangonumber9.com

Kayhan Kalhor

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PREVIEW Kayhan Kalhor’s splendid vehicle is the kamanche, a bowed string instrument often rendered in English as a "spike fiddle." Don’t be fooled by that bit of orientalism. Neither folksy nor punk, in Kalhor’s hands, the kamanche sings an eloquent and breathless tune, as assured and unfaltering as an operatic coloratura. Partnered with the rich and flawlessly clear string-tugging of the charismatic Brooklyn Rider string quartet, Kalhor’s vocabulary of Persian classical music and Kurdish folk melody soars, now with the rush of a high speed chase, now with wrenching pathos that would move a heart of stone. Presenter SFJazz has dubbed the genre "world chill," and I would urge you to ignore it. What is world? What is chill? Both the youthful Brooklyn Rider and the seasoned Kalhoun perform in fiery earnest, with scarcely a glance at any East-meets-West gimmickry. Still, without burdening these fine players with the shlockiness of a term like "world chill" or "crossover classical," it’s fair to say this pairing builds shrewdly on the success of projects like Yo-Yo Ma’s intercultural Silk Road Ensemble and Kronos Quartet’s record Caravan, (Nonesuch, 2000) which featured Kalhor’s grandly titled composition Gallop of a Thousand Horses. As that name suggests, when alumni of the European symphonic tradition and virtuosos like Kalhor jam out, there’s no fear of the epic. Watching this group feels like surrendering to the pleasures of a sweeping cinematic journey. And I watched it on YouTube — the Palace of Fine Arts will be the silver screen.

KAYHAN KALHOR With Brooklyn Rider. Sun/5, 7 p.m., $20–$55. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF. 1-866-920-JAZZ, www.sfjazz.org

Eclectic city

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Beyond the comfy crib of steady gigs like the Symphony or, say, Beach Blanket Babylon, working musicians survive by adapting to myriad habitats. Popping up all over town, they transition from El Dive-o one night to Lé Deluxe Lounge the next. It’s audiences who enjoy the luxury of worshipping regularly at the same musical temple, with the same congregation, be it hipster, hippie, or hip-replaced.

That’s why it’s likely — and intentional — that attendees of the Second Annual Switchboard Music Festival feel a little out of place. Billed as a "genre-defying spectacle," Switchboard promises to pull the rug out from under the audience — whether they’re used to beer stains or rich upholstery — and wow them with a first-class variety show of adventurous Bay Area acts. "We definitely got a good mix of contemporary classical music fans and indie-rock type people last year," says festival codirector Jonathan Russell, taking satisfaction in having enabled ironic and un-ironic tweed jackets to brush suede elbows in cultural camaraderie.

Among the many wonders on display at Dance Mission Theater this year are Melody of China, an ensemble with mastery of both traditional Chinese music and contemporary classical compositions on Chinese instruments; Zoyres, the buoyant purveyors of "Eastern European wild ferment;" Pamela Z, known for her gloriously experimental vocal ingenuity; and Edmund Welles, the world’s baddest (if not only) black-metal bass clarinet quartet. Oh yes … and Moe!

"It’s hard to describe," Russell laughs when asked to pin down the percussive tour de force Moe! Staiano. "He sees the entire world as a potential percussion object. You never quite know what’s going to happen next." Like Moe!, Russell and festival codirector Ryan Brown cultivate the kind of musical versatility that Russell admits "doesn’t fit neatly in the usual genre categories." A composer himself, he’s hip to music that gets played at clubs in the Mission, where fans of "new music" composers featured on the festival bill (like Damon Waitkus, David Lang, Mason Bates, Max Stoffregen, and Ken Thomson) might not normally venture. "We wanted to present that music in a little bit more of a concert setting, as opposed to noisy clubs." So Switchboard was born, with the idea that lovers of all kinds of new sounds might actually like each other — and each other’s favorite bands. Er, ensembles.

If founding an upstart festival seems ambitious these days, don’t expect Russell and Brown to twiddle their thumbs until sunnier times arrive. "Major funding organizations have a lot less money to throw around," Russell concedes. "But it emphasizes all the more that we need to be self-sufficient and take control of our own scene." To wit, Russell and Brown raised the bulk of Switchboard’s funds themselves, scaring up a deliciously eclectic lineup without any fussy institutions footing the bill. "Although," Russell notes, "they’re welcome to give us money if they want to."

SWITCHBOARD MUSIC FESTIVAL

Sun/29, 2–10 p.m., $10–$35

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th Street, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.switchboardmusic.com

But is it metal?

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Judgement Day has all the makings of a classic superhero: gritty back-story, freakish features, and extraordinary powers. And for a mutant that’s half-string quartet, half-power trio, this triple threat of violin, cello, and drums turns out to be mighty tough.

Dude, seriously, though. Violins are soft. Drums are loud. Is this going to work? Bowed string instruments have put down anchor in a spectacular variety of musical cultures, but aside from Rasputina and Apocalyptica, metal is still relatively undiscovered country — until you’ve watched the Oakland trio’s collection of eccentrically creepy YouTube entries. In the mini-horror flick Out of the Abyss (2007), the violin screams and dives over an utterly ruinous wall of thumping, sawing cello while zombies threaten to overturn the Marshall stacks. With a forthcoming second album in the can and plenty of tour miles supporting folks like Mates of State already behind them, it’s hard to imagine a rock venue Judgement Day can’t annihilate.

Just because these lads can rock 100 watts, though, doesn’t mean they can’t play a Stradivarius, straight up. This year’s self-released EP, Opus 4 Acoustic — the followup to their first full-length, Dark Opus (self-released, 2007) — shows JD doesn’t rely on sheer volume or slick production to achieve Yngwie-worthy intensity.

What to call this deviant half-breed? "We call it string metal," says violinist Anton Patzner. "But it’s a little bit debatable whether it’s metal." Lewis Patzner, Anton’s younger brother and the band’s furious low end, remembers when "a big metalhead came up to me after the show and was like, ‘Yeah, man, that’s metal! You play metal chords, metal rhythms — that’s metal.’<0x2009>" Yet Anton remembers another fan who saw things differently: "’Your music is sooo beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely not metal.’<0x2009>"

For the Patzners and drummer Jon Bush, pushing the limits of their instruments and their own virtuosity, hopefully taking a totally psyched audience along for the ride, is more important than impressing the poseur police. "When we play rock music," Anton says, "I’m not trying to copy metal riffs note for note from the guitar." Lewis agrees: "I’m really trying to capture the intention and then translate that to my instrument. It comes out better that way…. Honesty is a really important quality."

And if there’s any tradition Judgement Day is truly born of, it seems, it’s that of the passionate but savvy professional musician. The Patzners’ parents, not surprisingly, are pro performers and educators — and, full disclosure, my former teachers — who "emphasized the importance of being able to play other musical styles, because they understand the reality of trying to make a living."

For Anton, back in the day, that meant hitting the streets of Berkeley with his fiddle, making tips while working on his chops. When Lewis tagged along one day with his cello, Anton recalls, "I didn’t really know what to do, so we started playing metal, and it was a hit." With shout-outs to other "off-center" bands like Thrips, Judgement Day hasn’t outgrown those roots, thriving among industry-shunning, genre-defying DIYers that populate the Bay and the nation. Yeah, man, that’s metal.

JUDGEMENT DAY

With Geographer and Cotillion

Sun/17, 9 p.m., $10

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys

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PREVIEW Imagine an entry called "Hillbilly Music" on the Web site "Stuff White People Like." The lexicon of that sage barometer of upper middle-class culture might render something like, "Old-timey string band music, especially when performed by specimens plucked from unsophisticated rural communities; appeals to white people’s yearning for authenticity with the promise of a true white folkloric inheritance." Well, forget all that. It’s true that one of the most transparent examples of institutionalized segregation exists quite happily in the "traditional" aisle of your local record store (if you still have one) where soul and blues mean black; country and folk, white. Needless to say, our heritage of "string bands, songsters, and hoedowns," to quote a Rounder release of music by black Appalachian performers, is a glorious amalgam of Celtic, English, French, African, and Native American cures for hard labor, heartbreak, and hard times. Luckily, the Coen Brothers and their team knew that when they looked to the legendary bluegrass artist Ralph Stanley to provide the weight and pathos at the core of O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) with his startling a capella rendition of "O Death." Sure enough, "O Death" has shown up in both Anglo and African American traditions, folklorists say. And at the tender age of 81, Stanley still delivers a timeless performance that puts the soul in bluegrass and the country in the blues.

RALPH STANLEY AND THE CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS Fri/2, 8 p.m., $49.50. Also Sat/3. Freight and Salvage Coffee House, 1111 Addison, Berk. (510) 548-1761, www.freightandsalvage.org

Dance, horn dogs and damsels, dance

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Warning: listening to the Brass Menazeri is addictive — once they start, you can’t stop. After a sold-out show at Ashkenaz in Berkeley last month, the band of nine was dragged out for an encore or six — not an easy feat for an exhausted group of horn players. Meanwhile, the crowd got busy losing their minds the old-fashioned way: dancing and moving any way they knew how.

Though unquestionably exciting, brass band music from Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece sounds exotic to most American ears. But vocalist and baritone horn player Rachel MacFarlane isn’t concerned about being written off as an novelty act.

"It’s not a flash in the pan," she says of the growing interest in Eastern Europe and Romani, or Gypsy, culture in the wake of successful acts like New York City’s punked-out, spectacle-oriented Gogol Bordello. She sees the band’s success as part of a wider public engagement with cultures of the world, with roots in the folk revival of the 1970s.

Not that Balkan brass music has become mainstream, exactly. When vocalist Briget Boyle signed up for a college course on music from the former Yugoslavia, she says she had never even heard of the Balkans. Then she listened to the music. "Once I got it in my head," she remembers, "I couldn’t stop." Boyle developed a serious cultural crush, not just on a collection of poignant melodies, but on a way of life in which music, rather than being a commodity, represents a "life-giving force."

I knew what she meant that evening at Ashkenaz as I unselfconsciously sang along to refrains in the Romani language, without a clue as to what I was saying. That vitality, though, is part of what makes the flair and pathos of native Romani and Slavic performers so hard to replicate. Though band member Peter Jaques has cultivated phenomenal stylistic command on both trumpet and clarinet, he’s the first to admit this. In his efforts to learn from some of the region’s master musicians, he resembled a nonnative speaker trying to shed a foreign accent: "No one needed to tell me that there were nuances I just didn’t have," he explains. Still, Jaques says his teachers encouraged him, sending the message: "This is our music. We love it. You should play it, too!"

Moving toward a musical identity of their own, the Menazeri plans to include original tunes alongside the traditional picks on their second, still-untitled CD, which is slated for recording in May. It seems the group is feeling justifiably emboldened by steady support from wildly disparate Bay Area audiences, from folk dance enthusiasts and Balkanophiles to supporters of Romani culture and urban tastemakers like the Monterey Jazz Festival and Amnesia proprietor Sol Crawford.

Indeed, every band member I spoke with singled out Amnesia as a tinderbox for just the kind of music-driven near-rioting Brass Menazeri encourages. And it turns out the song I joined in with, "Opa Cupa," translates as a colorful invitation to work it out on the dance floor. So whether or not you can find Serbia on a map, the rat-a-tat of the tupan (a Balkan drum) mixed with sparkling, agile trumpets, unabashedly soulful vocals, and the gut-rattling throb of the low, low sousaphone is likely to send the same unignorable message as a New Orleans brass band during Mardi Gras. That message is: no matter who you are or what you know, dance!

BRASS MENAZERI

With Rupa and the April Fishes

Sat/3, 1 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

Mission and Third streets, SF

(415) 543-1718

www.ybgf.org

Also the Herdeljezi Roma Festival

Sat/3, 6:30 p.m., $15

Ives Park, Sebastopol

(707) 823-7941

www.voiceofroma.com

The seeds of health

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One warm winter day at Ruus Elementary in south Hayward, Chef Tiffany sweeps a roomful of second-graders into their only cooking class of the year. Before long, they’re shouting out the names of body parts that benefit from fresh veggies: "Eyes!" "Teeth!" "Heart!" And even if Swiss chard elicits a wary silence, the kids already know spinach from bok choy, and Chef Tiffany, known to adults as Tiffany Chenoweth, smoothly transitions from her talking points about leafy greens into the hands-on section of the class (after delivering a squirt of antibacterial gel onto the palms of each child). Meanwhile, out past the bustling blacktop, garden instructor Rachel Harris walks an ethnically diverse group of third graders through the concept of soil enrichment. They reluctantly tear down a lush patch of fava beans that reaches over their heads, pretending to pull nitrogen out of the air (hands up!) and deposit it into the soil to benefit spring crops (hands down!). This is school garden time.

If there’s a downside to teaching children how to nurture a green, nutritious school garden, it’s hard to fathom. The list of touted benefits is lengthy: students reap fresh air and physical exercise, hands-on participation, awareness of the natural environment, so called "school bonding," and an unprecedented taste for raw spinach. For school faculty, there are welcome breaks in the classroom regimen, an engaging outlet for unruly pupils, and a bridge to involvement with volunteers in the community. And parents get to share skills and experience, from farm expertise to carpentry, that once felt irrelevant to an academic setting.

But in an educational realm where standards reign supreme, the benefits of gardens can be tough to quantify. In promotional literature, the Network for a Healthy California, a funder of Hayward Unified School District’s program, stresses connections that reflect common sense, like the idea that making fresh vegetables readily accessible to low-income families will reduce the growing rate of obesity. But the future of garden instruction in the long term, when inroads against sprawling ills like obesity might become broadly measurable, is unpredictable when grants and appropriations change from year to year. Even in the Bay Area, where strawberry patches and kale flourish beside asphalt schoolyards, garden educators continually scramble to afford basic supplies, sometimes spending more time cultivating donors than mulching vegetables.

That’s how it often feels to Miriam Feiner, program director for the Willie Brown Jr. Academy Garden. "We’re pretty much our own two-person nonprofit," Feiner says of herself and assistant Joti Levy at an Arbor Day work party on March 8, where dozens of native seedlings — coffeeberry, sticky monkey flower, and other species attractive to bees — awaited planting on a weedy slope.

The duo’s fundraising efforts have been rewarded with sizable grants from SF Environment’s Environmental Justice Grant Program and Alec Shaw of the Shaw Fund, as well as partnerships with San Francisco Beautiful and Friends of the Urban Forest.

Even more rewarding though, Feiner says, weekly garden-based classes at Willie Brown have students literally begging for kale. But she concedes that ultimately the current model, which is based on constant fundraising, is "not sustainable."

Difficulties in funding aside, people like Abby Jaramillo, the youthful director of San Francisco nonprofit Urban Sprouts, will gladly explain why it’s important to find a way to sustain such programs. When Jaramillo and her team took over the Excelsior Garden, shared by the June Jordan School for Equity and Excelsior Middle School, she said she was "up to her armpits in fennel."

But the overgrown herbs weren’t the only sign of disrepair. "It was a struggling middle school desperately in need of something that would make the students have a stake," she said. Describing the community’s "food environment," a term of art in nutrition education, she listed liquor store fare and junk food as the most prevalent options. Five years and six new school gardens later, Jaramillo thinks school administrators and teachers are genuinely on board with Urban Sprouts, whose mission is to serve low-income youth in San Francisco. "When the kids come outside; they are leaders, teaching each other how to plant," she says. "We need to make the garden a core, that will remain here and make a difference."

Whether that happens depends on whether garden education becomes institutionalized, not just a supplemental benefit reliant on the assiduousness of leaders like Jaramillo and Feiner. "My dream," Jaramillo says, "is that it would be like gym." That is to say, an expected feature of the precollege landscape. I asked her if there were models for this kind of integration. She, and everyone else I spoke with, pointed to the Edible Schoolyard, the celebrated collaboration between local-food pioneer Alice Waters and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. At the Schoolyard, a beneficiary of the Chez Panisse foundation, the perpetual cycle of seasons meshes with the academic year as rising eighth graders ceremonially plant corn for incoming sixth graders to harvest in the fall, suggesting a garden practice that is truly rooted in the school experience.

According to the San Francisco Unified School District, out of 104 K-12 school sites in the city, 36 maintain "green schoolyards," with 45 new gardens planned over the next four years. Statewide, $10.8 million from Sacramento was awarded in the form of California Instructional School Garden Program grants in October. It’s not nearly enough to fulfill the California Department of Education’s stated goal of "a garden in every school." But as Jordan students prepare to sow enough lettuce to provide the entire school with a lunch salad for one day, Jaramillo is hopeful that showing even a small percentage of kids where food comes from will have a lasting effect, with lessons about healthy eating rippling out through them to their families and into the community.

With the infrastructure of garden education still in its founding stages, assessing its efficacy poses a conundrum. The kind of life-changing transformations that green schoolyard proponents hope for might not be apparent in the short term, while slashed budgets threaten to endanger the longevity of even the most lovingly planted plots. Still, educators like Harris aren’t daunted by the relative nonstandardization of their field. She’s seen the results first-hand — like the student at a Hayward school barbecue who traded a Butterfinger for a second helping of grilled zucchini. After our interview, as Harris left the grocery store where she’ll teach her class to distinguish between processed and fresh food, a Ruus student in pigtails greeted her excitedly. "Miss Rachel!" she cried, throwing her head back with a wide grin. "I like garden!"

Jovino Santos Neto and Harvey Wainapel Duo

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PREVIEW “You know, Brazil is a huge country,” points out Bay Area clarinetist and saxophonist Harvey Wainapel. He should know – Weinapel has been making yearly musical pilgrimages to the world’s fifth largest nation since 2000, and has no plans to stop. The variety of musical traditions across cultures and regions is practically inexhaustible, he says, with perhaps only a single common thread: “they all swing like hell.” Naturally, that irrepressible, infectious rhythmicality will be on display as Wainapel partners with native Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto for a wide-ranging exploration of their favorite musical territory. “Every jazz musician plays a little Jobim now and then,” explains Wainapel, referring to that ever-present “Girl from Ipanema” and her bossa nova companions in the jazz Real Book. But few possess as deep an understanding of Brazil’s disparate musical influences as this duo, who revel in the unique mingling of African, European, and indigenous elements. While Wainapel’s penchant for Braziliana has led him to perform with defining artists like Airto Moreira, FloraPurim, and Guinga, Brazilian-born Neto is literally the professor, having worked with Brazilian jazz legend Hermeto Pascoal for twenty five years and now teaching Brazilian music history. The lecture-demonstration format of this performance promises a lively education from two lifelong students of Brazilian music. “Hopefully,” adds Neto, “people will have a lot of fun.”.
JOVINO SANTOS AND HARVEY WAINAPEL DUO: “BRAZILIAN MUSIC FROM YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW” Fri/11, 7:30 p.m., $10-$15. Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont, Oakl. (510) 228-3218, www.lifemarkgroup.com

Gamelan Sekar Jaya

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PREVIEW A Balinese gamelan ensemble is a world within a world, where the very notion of time is freed from the banality of the steadily ticking clock and sent sailing on a twisting river of interlocking rhythms. The many facets of traditional percussion music from Indonesia can be hard to grasp all at once — dainty metal hammers flash as golden-robed performers, seated on the floor, sway back and forth to a hauntingly tuned scale. Suddenly, the tempo quickens, urged on by agitated drum beats, and a dancer shifts from slow graceful movements to frenetic gestures and theatrical facial expressions. Sinuous flute and metal clangs blend into a pulsing, shimmering wall of sound.

It is the Bay Area’s great fortune that Gamelan Sekar Jaya, devoted to presenting authentic performances of energetic, elaborate, and sonically enchanting Balinese gamelan music, calls El Cerrito home. For this concert, they’ll dust off three distinct sets of pitched metal gongs and marimbalike instruments from Bali, with guest bandleaders Dewa Putu Berata and Gadung Kasturi direct from one of the island’s most celebrated gamelan troupes. There’s a feast to be had here for gamelan enthusiasts, notably the appearance of Oakland’s adventuresome Balinese fusioneers, Gamelan X. And for the uninitiated, it’s high time to take that long-awaited vacation to Bali, right in your own backyard.

GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA With Gamelan X, Dewa Putu Berata, and Gadung Kasturi. Sat/5, 8 p.m., $10–$18. Julia Morgan Center, 2640 College, Berk. (925) 798-1000, www.gsj.org

Superlist: Make some noise

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› superlists@sfbg.com

Don’t despair if your frequent oral treatises to progressive ideals end up falling on deaf ears. Instead, let your feet walk and your trumpet talk. Armed with even an undernourished musical skill and the will to disregard noise ordinances in your neighborhood, you can find a street band, whether bawdy or principled, to soundtrack your most ardently held beliefs. Oh, you’ll be heard all right.

Bateria Lucha (www.baterialucha.org) could be loosely translated as "drums for the struggle," but essentially the passion of the Brazilian percussion tradition to which the name refers has no cognate in staid English. Catalyzed by the initial uproar over the current Iraq war, Lucha founder Derek Wright envisioned a musical force that would unify and groove-ify the chants of protesters, not drown out their message. Today, aspiring bateristas can join Wright for multilevel Brazilian percussion workshops each Thursday in Oakland in preparation for Bateria Lucha’s musical surge tactics, employed everywhere from picket lines to San Francisco Carnaval.

If you’ve ever joined a human blockade on Market or picketed the Woodfin Hotel, you’ve certainly had your marching morale boosted by the Brass Liberation Orchestra (< a href="http://www.brassliberation.org" target="blank_">www.brassliberation.org). Hailing from Oakland and San Francisco, this dedicated group takes peace and social justice activism seriously, even when enticing a city block of protesters to shake it to the Black Eyed Peas. Dispatching a spirited crew of brass, woodwind, and percussion players to rallies and events around the region, the BLO welcomes new members who can keep pace with the music and the cause.

If it’s spectacle you seek, look no further than Extra Action Marching Band (www.extra-action.com), the drum majors of San Francisco values since 1999. Credited with being among the early subverters of the once mannerly marching band aesthetic, Extra Action still manages to shock audiences with antics and braggadocio, often posing profound questions such as: why perform on a stage when you can dance naked on top of the bar?

Offering youth classes in San Francisco since 1994, the leadership of Loco Bloco (www.locobloco.org) has already raised a generation of students into its own ranks. Each year, the nonprofit’s mentors in Brazilian drumming and dance prepare a performance group for participation in San Francisco’s Carnaval. Drawing a strong contingency of players already affiliated with Loco Bloco, rehearsals preceding the May parade are open to all ages and abilities. The $5 class fee for adult Carnaval participants goes toward scholarships for youth.

Oakland’s Loyd Family Players (www.theloydfamilyplayers.com) are no purists. Beats and hooks from the band members’ own diverse musical backgrounds have found their way into this bateria’s boisterous repertoire. Nevertheless, the lineup of Brazilian surdos, snare drums, shakers, and bells still carries the distinctive thump of authentic samba at its craziest. Props go to the fiercest female percussion section around.

A spirit of cheerful anarchy sustains the Los Trancos Woods Community Marching Band (www.ltwcmb.com), which began its long life on New Years Day, 1960, in a hilltop village tucked away behind Palo Alto. The application for new members requires only "the desire to have a good time," and rehearsals are limited to once a year. You can tag along with their procession through North Beach on Columbus Day as long as your "uniform" is suitably absurd, but you’ll know you’re really in the club when you find yourself halfway to Monterey honking New Orleans–style kazoo in the Castroville Artichoke Festival Parade.

The Musicians Action Group (Magband@aol.com), a self-described circle of "old left wingers," roots its music in the history of American activism, performing songs of the labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements. Born out of a need to make noise about social justice, MAG has played at major demonstrations and protests since 1981. The group welcomes newcomers who share their mission of supporting progressive causes with music that is historically and politically significant.

Jewish Music Festival

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PREVIEW Few genre-themed music festivals enjoy as much freedom in programming as Berkeley’s Jewish Music Festival, now in its 23rd year. For who’s to say what the criteria are? Jewish music expresses joy and pathos, success and failure, the thrill of adventure and the solace of tradition, assimilation, ostracism, whimsy, and gravity, as much as music — and only music — can. And so goes the festival, staking out its territory with challenging and alluring forays all over the Jewish cultural map.

Klezmatics frontman Frank London opens the proceedings with "A Night in the Old Marketplace," a newly commissioned song cycle based on a Yiddish play penned in 1907 by I.L. Peretz. Of course, if Berkeley is the birthplace of slow food, you might call "The Ark: Cyclical Rituals," the most ambitious program of the festival, "fast music." In the space of a week, nine notable performers, including London and influential Bay Area composers John Schott and Jewlia Eisenberg, will board a creative Noah’s Ark, devising a collaborative debut on themes of ritual and tradition.

Two more sure bets: violinist Kaila Flexer and oud player Gari Hegedus of the acoustic ensemble Teslim play Middle Eastern and Sephardic traditional music with understated mastery of melody and ornamentation. And, straight out of the promised land of New York City, the punk-rock klezmer band Golem expands the limits of the shtetl songbook with show-stopping stage presence and a remarkable grasp of Yiddishkeit.

JEWISH MUSIC FESTIVAL Fri/22–Sun/30. (510) 848-0237, visit www.jewishmusicfestival.org for specific times and locations.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

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PREVIEW While electronics have transformed the very core of contemporary dance music, rap, and pop, so-called art music of the concert hall persuasion still centers on acoustic instruments reverberating in real time. But some of the earliest feats of sound manipulation, predating the Beatles’ trippy tape loops and even the ’60s soul tracks destined for an afterlife in eternal sampledom, were achieved by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was decidedly not a populist. In current terms, "electronic" music tends to denote the limitless reorganization of beats and breaks, but Stockhausen dispensed with regular rhythms altogether, turning his attention to the most basic components of sound itself, using now-primitive equipment to generate sine waves and splice magnetic tape. The most famous result of his experiments, aside from a nod from the Fab Four on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, may be the 40-minute tape-based work Kontakte, for piano, percussion, and electronics, premiered in 1960. Pianist Julie Steinberg, who also moonlights as a percussionist for this performance by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, emphasizes the prohibitive complexity of performing Kontakte live. "We have to know the electronics perfectly," she says of playing along with Stockhausen’s original four-channel futuristic noise collage, now a digital version realized by a sound projectionist as the performers play. Conceived in recognition of the late composer’s 80th birthday by percussionist Willie Winant, whose cutting-edge creds include work with Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Wilco, and the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, this is a rare realization of what Winant calls "a masterwork" and a "seminal piece."

SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS Mon/17, preconcert talk 7:15 p.m., concert 8 p.m.; $10–$27; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; 978-ARTS, www.sfcmp.org

Uri Caine and Friends

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PREVIEW The versatile jazz pianist Uri Caine has carved a niche for himself as a fearless interpreter of classical music. His discography includes idiosyncratic recordings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, J.S. Bach, Mahler, and Wagner. In 2006 he began to investigate Hungarian folk music at the source, delving into Béla Bartók’s original field recordings of village performances, documented on wax cylinders in the early 20th century. While Caine notes that some aspects of the music are tough to translate into Western terms, given the inflection and distinctly unsquare rhythms of traditional dances, the melodic material serves as an ideal springboard for his brand of agile improvisation. For his Feb. 16 performance, Caine and his ensemble visit Hungary’s distant musical territory with no pretension to exact authenticity. It’s a good hook, considering both Caine’s credentials and the local craze for Eastern European traditions, with Balkan brass bands and Roma-inspired DJs abounding. It will be exciting to hear Caine explore this expansive concept with artful and inspired clarinetist Chris Speed and respected long-time contributors to the adventurous downtown New York improvisational scene drummer Jim Black, violinist Joyce Hamman, and bassist John Hebert. Even if their distinctive flavors take a moment to blend, these are the ingredients for a good stew. Caine will round out his visit to the Bay Area with a solo piano performance and discussion at the Community Music Center in the Mission District, free of charge.

URI CAINE Fri/15, 6 p.m., free. Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF. (415) 647-6015, www.sfcmc.org

URI CAINE AND FRIENDS Sat/16, 8 p.m., $27–$39. Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg., 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org