Paris is a city for dreaming.
Guitarist Nick Rossi flew to the City of Lights a year ago for the International Duke Ellington Meeting, a three-day conference for experts, scholars and musicians devoted to Ellingtonia, the musical world surrounding America’s most consequential 20th century composer, bandleader and pianist. A scholar of pre-World War II jazz who’s lived in the Mission for two decades, Rossi gave a short talk on guitarist Fred Guy, a key member of the Ellington Orchestra from 1925 to 1949. After communing with some of his favorite authors and researchers, Rossi came home with a nagging question and the seed for his next musical mission.
“Why doesn’t San Francisco, or California or the West Coast, have an ensemble dedicated to Duke’s music?” he wondered. “Not to throw shade on groups that play Ellington, but there are bands exclusively devoted to Ellingtonia in many other cities and countries, but not here. I realized these are my marching orders.”
The long trek from Paris to San Francisco culminated at Mr. Tipple’s last October, when Rossi’s nine-piece Jazzopaters debuted at the Civic Center supper club, which has become the project’s home base. Focusing on pieces recorded by Ellington’s small groups, variously sized ensembles broken out from the orchestra to showcase its singular voices like alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, trumpeter Cootie Williams, and baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, Rossi’s Jazzopators play a dance show Saturday at the Community Music Center.
With pianist Rob Reich and Patrick Wolff on alto sax and clarinet, the group features some of the region’s most esteemed improvisers alongside hot jazz specialists Mikiya Matsuda on bass and Riley Baker on drums, For Rossi, playing a gig walking distance from his home isn’t unusual. A Mission resident since 2002, “the longest I’ve lived anywhere, period,” Rossi has performed at Curio Bar & Restaurant and The Liberties with small groups recent years, and provided a propulsive score for the Wednesday night Cat’s Corner swing dance sessions that recently moved to the Valencia Room (formerly the Elbo Room). He’s back in the neighborhood June 8 at the Verdi Club with Nick Rossi Swing Six, playing a monthly dinner dance series.
Rossi’s Jazzopaters also perform Friday at Stanford University as part of the Department of Music’s Jazz Inside Out series, a sit-down concert that allows the group to play with a wider array of tempos and dynamics. But Rossi notes that Ellington’s music was often created for dancing, and bringing it into the CMC’s ballroom feels particularly apt. He’s played the hot jazz and swing dance party known as the Bootleggers Ball there several times, “and playing this music in a space that existed when this music was created is kind of a big deal to me,” Rossi said. “We’re having this active dialogue with the past in as real a way as possible.”
Megan Lowe Dances
Grappling with the past is a thread running through Megan Lowe Dances’ world premiere of “Just a Shadow,” an emotionally expansive project inspired by grief and the loss of loved ones at the Joe Goode Annex May 31-June 9. A featured artist of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s 27th Annual United States of Asian America Festival, she collaborated individually with A.J. Gardner, Sonsherée Giles, Josh Icban, Frances Teves Sedayao, Roel Seeber, and Shira Yaziv to create six duets designed around the particular strengths and movement practices of each collaborator, including contemporary dance, site-specific dance, vertical dance, turf dance, contact improvisation, and live music (performed by Josh Icban and Lowe).
The title and the project’s genesis come from the same place, a poem Lowe’s mother sent her a decade ago via Facebook Messenger shortly before she died. Two years ago, Lowe lost her younger sister, and promptly found herself in an intense period of work, “project after project that was artistically fulfilling, but that didn’t allow me much time to process her passing,” Lowe said. Realizing she was surrounded by people who had also unexpectedly lost loved ones, she embarked on a series of conversations that flowed into dance-making, “a lovely way of healing and connecting with each other,” she said.
“We created specific duets, and the product is not the focus,” she said. “The process is the focus. Memories of loved ones. Challenges that we’ve faced. We’re not trying to put our trauma on stage, like ‘Now I’m going to tell the world my sob story.’”
Her mother’s poem provides a thematic thread. Lowe took the verse as something of an apology for a difficult relationship, a wish she could make things right and that things had been different between them. One of the song’s Lowe wrote for the production folds in the poem, and several of the duets picked up various of themes relating to light and dark.
“We do quite a bit of shadow work, analyzing shadows from many perspectives,” Lowe said. “Shadows as memory, shadows as ghosts. Sonsherée talks about the way darkness can’t exist without light, that you need the contrast, and that sadness can make bright moments happier.”
