Jeff Kaliss

Jeff Kaliss has featured and reviewed classical, jazz, rock, and world musics and other entertainment for the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other regional, national, international, and web-based publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, is a published poet, and is the author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone (Backbeat Books) and numerous textbook and encyclopedia entries, album liner notes, and festival program notes.

Articles By This Author

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Review

An Intimate Bohème From West Bay Opera

Jeff Kaliss - October 19, 2009
Giacomo Puccini often chose settings that brought opera up close and personal, and he thus worked vital changes on the form and made it ready for the 20th century.
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Review

Wild Ride Through Brooklyn

Jeff Kaliss - October 13, 2009

The music of this CD/DVD is easier on the ear than the concept is easy on the mind. But that doesn’t obviate the importance of, and the potential pleasure in, embracing the full intent of the creator, Sufjan Stevens.

An Interview With David Harrington: Forever Deepening Musical Relationships

Jeff Kaliss - September 28, 2009
In his fourth decade as a violinist and as both founder and artistic director of the award-winning Kronos Quartet, David Harrington still exudes the infectious excitement of a gifted student infatuated with experimental and global music from beyond the conservatory’s walls.
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Preview

Taking a Fresh Look at Otello

Jeff Kaliss - September 28, 2009
The title of the piece opening Stanford Lively Arts’ 2009-2010 season, aside from its references to Shakespeare’s play of four centuries ago and Verdi’s adaptation (as Otello) to the operatic stage in 1887, denotes a psychopathological rage based on suspected spousal infidelity. There’s a threat, with The Othello Syndrome, that lovers of classical literature and music might be driven into a simila
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Feature

Attuning Your Kids to Music:Lessons From Anne Crowden

Jeff Kaliss - August 18, 2009

Putting kids in tune with music can be a tricky adjustment. When my piano-teacher mother was raising us, there were fewer distractions vying with the sounds of her practicing Schumann and Chopin and the classical programming of WQXR radio.

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Preview

Dead Symphony at the Cabrillo Festival

Jeff Kaliss - July 21, 2009
The music of the Grateful Dead, arguably rock ’n’ roll’s first jam band, is staging a second coming, in symphonic garb, in the land where the band began, 44 years ago. Composer Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6, based on the Dead canon, will be showcased on Aug. 9, the third day of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz.
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Review

Venturing Onto Kronos' Floodplain

Jeff Kaliss - June 22, 2009

There’s so much music, and more, in Kronos’ latest CD that I felt compelled to question the quartet’s founder and violinist David Harrington at his Sunset District base of operations, seeking details and explanations beyond the liner notes. Much of that conversation will be the source of a future artist profile.

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Preview

Music of All the Americas

Jeff Kaliss - June 7, 2009
Pride comes naturally when you’re a singer with the San Francisco Boys Chorus. Just ask eighth-grader Dominique Shaw about the delightfully eclectic program that he and fellow choristers will be presenting at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco on June 13.
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Review

Spot-On Send-Off

Jeff Kaliss - May 21, 2009
“Shadows and Light” was the theme of the final four concerts of the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s current season, with the repertoire selected for references to the night. But what really shone through the five pieces on the variegated program was how wonderfully the music and the players were suited to each other.
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Preview

Compact Orchestra, Expanded Playlist

Jeff Kaliss - May 11, 2009
Chatting with subscribers who have been with her for all of her ensemble’s 17 seasons, Barbara Day Turner had her mission confirmed. “They’re noting how much being constantly exposed to different things has changed how they listen to music,” Turner reports.