Usually when I write about jazz I begin with the premise that it is “chamber music by other means,” under the assumption that most of the listening skills we build up from our chamber music experiences will serve us well when we decide to take in a performance or recording by a jazz combo or soloist. The current San Francisco Jazz Festival (SFJAZZ) schedule, however, will include one offering likely to invert my premise. Anonymous 4 is probably familiar to most classical music listeners. They are best known as a female a cappella quartet (Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) specializing in early music (particularly prior to the seventeenth century) but also, as was evident in their last appearance with San Francisco Performances, an equal interest in early American folk sources.
Anonymous 4 will give the SFJAZZ Sacred Space concert this season. That is the performance that takes place in Grace Cathedral, conceived with the intention of exploiting the acoustics of the space that differ radically from a typical concert hall (or, for that matter, jazz club). Most notably, Grace has a seven-second echo; so any performance in the space, as I have previously observed, can not be anything other than a grand experiment. Indeed, the experiment is so grand that it is almost impossible to anticipate what will emerge by way of a listening experience.
The program Anonymous 4 has prepared for this space is entitled (perhaps with pun intended) Sisters in Spirit. It will feature both of their aforementioned repertoire specialties. The medieval portion of their concert will draw upon material from their recent harmonia mundi release, Secret Voices: Music from The Las Huelgas Codex. This Codex is a rich anthology of sacred music, both polyphonic and monophonic, from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and Hellauer prepared new transcriptions from the source for the Secret Voices recording project. The early American music, in turn, will draw upon tracks from their Gloryland CD, also released by harmonia mundi.
The Anonymous 4 Sacred Space concert will take place in Grace Cathedral (1100 California Street, on Nob Hill) on Friday, November 18, at 8 PM. SFJAZZ members have an admission fee of $22 and $30 in the Premium section. The admission for non-members is $30 and $40. Tickets may be ordered through the event page on the SFJAZZ Web site. This page also includes two tracks from Gloryland and two video clips. Further information may be obtained by called 866-920-5299.
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