Phillip Greenlief may not have played in every club, café, theater, and bar in the Mission but, looking back over the past four decades, you’d be hard pressed to find more than half a dozen joints unanointed by his saxophone.
Punk rock and film scores, free jazz and Thelonious Monk, standards and solo saxophone recitals, Greenlief has been game for just about any kind of gig, though he’s best known as a cornerstone of the Bay Area’s creative music scene, an umbrella that covers a wide spectrum of compositional and improvisational practices. One of his primary outposts in recent years has been Medicine For Nightmares, where he returns Friday for a set of improvised duets with fellow reed expert Sheldon Brown as part of saxophonist David Boyce’s weekly Other Dimensions In Sound series. Despite a friendship that stretches back to the late 1970s, and countless hours playing together in private, this is only their second public concert as a duo.
They first met in 1978 at the Blue Moon, “a little joint in Arcata, where all the locals played,” Greenlief said. “He inspired me from the first moment. We lived together in the early ‘80s, and in the ‘90s when I moved back from Los Angeles he was living at Valencia and 25th, and I was living in Bernal Heights. He had a basement studio, and we played all the time.”
Greenlief is back at the bookstore-cum-venue Tuesday, March 26 for a performance celebrating the release of the third album by animals & giraffes, “Live at Medicine For Nightmares.” The project is built on Greenlief’s creative communion with poet and arts writer Claudia La Rocco, who’s also his partner. They’ll be joined by Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, English horn and electronics, and Alexandra Buschman-Román on voice and electronics, who both play on the album, and special guests Chris Cooper, Tom Djll, Danishta Rivero, and Zachary James Watkins.
Relocating to Maine
Greenlief might be making other appearances at Medicine in the coming months, but he and La Rocco, a critic and reporter for The New York Times from 2005-2015 and editorial director of Open Space from 2016 until SFMOMA shuttered the platform in 2021, are relocating to Maine in June. It’s a major loss for the Bay Area arts world, though they’re both planning to maintain their deep ties to the local scene.
The move is largely motivated by the desire to be closer to family, but Greenlief also treasures the free time he’ll be afforded by a much lower cost of living. He’s shutting down his private teaching practice, and stepping down as director of music programs at the San Francisco Waldorf High School, where he’s led the orchestra and jazz ensemble since 2006.
On extended summer sojourns to the house they bought in Maine, he’s found that the peace and quiet serves as a blank canvas, a muse; “and, as a composer, I’ve been incredibly prolific,” he said. “I’ve written so much music just sitting in this room, looking out at this cove. I just read the Sonny Rollins biography, and I’ve been thinking, ‘You’re not practicing enough!’ And how can you? I really feel for young musicians. When I moved here in the late ‘70s, I was 20 and my rent was $170. I had a solo piano gig out in Martin, two nights a week, making $40 plus tips and a meal. I was making my rent. I had all kinds of time to practice, to get my shit together. How does some 21-year-old move here and get it together?”
Greenlief remembers a Mission of New College, 16th Note and punk
Greenlief has lived in Oakland since the turn of the century, but the Mission has served as a primary base of operations for much of his life. “My first Bay Area gig was at a café at Clarion Alley and Mission,” Greenlief recalled. “Like hundreds of other places, every little coffee house had some sort of music.”
Our conversation took place over the phone, but I hope someone with a podcast or video series takes Greenlief on a walking tour through the neighborhood, to detail all the venues that have come and gone, or been rechristened multiple times over the years. Greenlief summons a world that’s faded and transformed with institutions like the New College of California (1971-2008), “which had a gallery across the street on Valencia with a grand piano where I played a bunch,” he said.
“The space now occupied by Kilowatt was the 16th Note, where I played a lot with a Prime Time-like band,” Greenlief said, referring to Ornette Coleman’s guitar-driven free-funk band. “There was a punk club at the top of Valencia I played with punk bands, that was in the ‘80s. When I moved back in the ‘90s, there was always something interesting at Radio Valencia, and I played there with Leo Smith and all kinds of projects. And Bruno’s was where I finally joined Clubfoot, and later Orchestra Nostalgico.”
There are many ways in which Greenlief has been an essential creative hub, linking the Bay Area scene to a far-flung network of composers and improvisers. He released dozens of albums on his Evander Music label, back when CDs were still objects to collect.
There are several other opportunities to catch him before he heads east, including pianist/composer Nathan Clevenger’s April 25 performance at the Center For New Music, celebrating the release of his Trio+2 album “Unsettled By the Ocean” featuring drummer/percussionist Jordan Glenn, reed player Cory Wright, saxophonist Kasey Knudsen and cellist Crystal Pascucci-Clifford with Greenlief and accordionist Marié Abe as guests. Greenlief’s long-running duo with drummer Scott Amendola plays Bird and Beckett Books & Records in Glen Park on April 27.
The Lost Trio at Bird and Beckett
Another long-running group, the Lost Trio, plays a mini-residency at Bird and Beckett June 14 and 15. The collective trio, with bassist Dan Seamans and drummer Tom Hassett, has recorded a series of casually brilliant albums that are as authoritative delving into the music of Thelonious Monk as they are restlessly investigating American Songbook standards, the Grateful Dead, Hank Williams, and Joni Mitchell. On the second night, the trio will be joined by several guests, including trumpeter Darren Johnston and saxophonist Beth Schenck.
Greenlief with Citta di Viti trio
A devoted and erudite cinephile, Greenlief plays a going-away party at Uptown Oakland’s Duende June 17 with Citta di Viti, a trio with bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and drummer Jason Levis that plays a body of music Greenlief composed while watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s early 1960s trilogy (“L’avventura,” “La notte” and “L’eclisse”) featuring the great Italian actor Monica Vitti. But before he finishes packing, he’s playing a final gig with the film score-inspired Orchestra Nostalgico at the June 21 summer solstice Garden of Memory event at Oakland’s Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes, “for which I wrote an arrangement of Mancini’s ‘Touch of Evil’ as a parting gift,” he said.
It’s hard to see him go, but Greenlief assures us he’ll be back at least twice a year, and it’s a safe bet that Medicine For Nightmares will be on his itinerary.
“I really like the sound of that room,” he said. “It’s just perfect for things that don’t hang out in loud territory for long periods of time. It’s one of those bookstores you walk into and you’re like, ‘oh no, there are 20 books I have to have.’ And afterwards, I stop by this little Salvadoran place and get pupusas, El Zocalo, and I’m so happy. The Mission is beautiful. Of course, it’s changed. But what city hasn’t? You have to love the spots while they’re there.”
The musicians, too.
