Jazz Pop returns in its 15th season with leading lights of West Coast jazz and improvised music in the Hammer courtyard! This edition showcases innovative SoCal and Bay Area bandleader-composers who explore a range of influences, from hip hop to free jazz to Italian cinema, featuring infectious grooves, masterful improvisation, and dynamic ensemble interplay.

Miguel Atwood-Ferguson Ensemble – August 4

Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, 5-string electric violin
Devin Daniels, alto saxophone
Alison Bjorkedal, harp
Greg Spero, keyboard
Gabe Noel, electric bass
Gene Coye, drums
Paul Taylor, percussion

Violinist, composer, and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson regularly works with jazz, classical, hip-hop, and pop stars, performing as a sideperson with Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, and Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, and arranging music for the likes of Anderson. Paak., the Black Eyed Peas, Dr. Dre, and Questlove. Atwood-Ferguson brings this expansive and inclusive musical vision to his own projects, creating a kaleidoscopic blend of artfully balanced urban grooves, dreamy melodicism, and daring orchestration.

This unique ensemble features a driving rhythm section, harp, saxophone, and Atwood-Ferguson’s own virtuosic 5-string electric violin playing. “[Atwood-Ferguson] has become a kind of Wynton Marsalis or Gunther Schuller for the postsoul, semijazz, pacifist-hip-hop continuum: a leader of skilled ensembles, a celebrator of repertories, an organizer of legacies” (The New York Times).

Tina Raymond Trio – August 11

Andrew Renfroe, guitar
Karl McComas-Reichl, bass
Tina Raymond, drums

In her debut album, Left, Right, Left, Los Angeles drummer Tina Raymond explores America’s polarized politics through a set of patriotic hymns, folk songs, protest anthems, and music by Woody Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez. Her thesis is that concepts of left and right are integral to understanding both drumming technique and American political discourse. A first-call sideperson in the Southern California jazz community, Raymond has performed and recorded with Bobby Bradford, Jeff Parker, Art Lande, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Vinny Golia, among many others. Here she leads her guitar-bass-drums trio through a set of new and recent music that showcases her stellar musicianship and broad musical imagination. “Raymond displays ferocious chops and a remarkable sense of balance, supporting the overall group sound as much as she asserts her individual voice” (Downbeat).

Phillip Greenlief: Citta di Vitti – August 18

Phillip Greenlief, alto saxophone
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass
Jason Levis, drums

It’s hard to overstate the impact multi-reed player and composer Phillip Greenlief has had on the San Francisco Bay Area music community, where he has been a performer, ensemble leader, and collaborator with musicians, dancers, and writers for more than three decades. A master improviser, Greenlief has performed with creative music luminaries like Fred Frith, Wadada Leo Smith, and Joëlle Léandre, and guested with rock bands like They Might Be Giants and Thelonious Monster.

Greenlief is also a devout cinephile, and his Citta di Vitti project is a collection of evocative, jaunty, moody compositions for trio (alto saxophone, bass, drums) that he composed to accompany the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose muse, the luminous actor Monica Vitti, died in early 2022. “A ravishing, spacious, and angst-ridden set of tunes” (San Francisco Classical Voice).

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