SFJAZZ presents Mary Halvorson's Code Girl featuring Michael Formanek, Tomas Fujiwara, Amirtha Kidambi, and Adam O'Farrill
Joe Henderson Lab
SFJAZZ Center, 205 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94102 USA
Late Show, 7:30 PM, Sunday, July 21, 2019

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[7:29 PM announcements from the soundboard mixer]

1. [7:31 PM] The Beast
2. [7:37 PM] (unidentified tune #1, lyric snippet “trace amounts of dynamo”)
3. [7:48 PM] Storm Cloud
4. [7:57 PM] (unidentified instrumental)
5. [8:03 PM] The Unexpected Natural Phenomenon
6. [8:14 PM] Possibility of Lightning
7. [8:22 PM] Accurate Hit
   [set ends 8:27 PM MH introduces the band; 8:29 PM all off; 8:30 PM no encore, we're done. Drat!]

• Michael Formanek: contrabass;
• Tomas Fujiwara: drums;
• Mary Halvorson: guitar;
• Amirtha Kidambi: vox;
• Adam O'Farrill: trumpet.

Tonight's show was pretty darn strange. Very little in the traditional jazz vein here, rather, something more like avant garde classical art song with angular and spiky back-up from a small ensemble. Presumably I got the lyric snippets wrong for the first two tunes; hopefully someone with better ears than me will laugh and share positive identification – I expect all of the tunes came from the Code Girl album, but heck, neither Mary nor Amirtha said a word to us about the tunes, so that's just another guess too.

As expected, Mary played a lot of really interesting guitar, but it wasn't easy to follow either melodically or harmonically – she's got a strange muse! I'm sure I'll see her again sometime, but next time I think I'll try and do a bit better in my pre-show prep: listening to the album would have helped me appreciate the gig.

Andrew Gilbert posted a review for tonight's early show at SFCV.

Big thanks to Ting for the photo gallery!

Whoa! This section is incomplete for now, sorry!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2019 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2019 event list! ☸ On to the next event!