Trumpeters have defined jazz's vanguard since the music emerged more than a century ago from New Orleans, and this double bill features two horn players who are extending that proud legacy.
A lion of the avant-garde since his membership in Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s, Wadada Leo Smith is inthe midst of a spectacular late career creative burst. Over the past decade the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award-winner released nearly two dozen albums, including a series of ambitious projects, most notably 2012's epic Pulitzer Prize finalist Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform), an orchestral four-disc project inspired by the civil rights movement. For his return to SFJAZZ he presents the world premiere of Appassionata, a multi-movement work scored for the latest incarnation of his Golden Quintet focusing on Anita Hill, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Lorraine Hansberry, Pablo Casals, and the Falling Man (and Woman) of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The supremely inventive Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen, a familiar Bay Area presence from his six-year stint in the SFJAZZ Collective, focuses on new material and music from his recent quartet releases for ECM, 2016's Into the Silence and Cross My Palm with Silver from 2017. The Tel Aviv native is a four-time DownBeat Critics Poll winner and an artist of rare range and clarion tone who has excelled through work as a bandleader with his trio Triveni, as part of the world-fusion collective Third World Love, in sideman settings with Jason Lindner, Mark Turner, and Omer Avital, and as part of the band 3 Cohens with his jazz-playing siblings Anat and Yuval.