Sarah Wilson Comes to the Red Poppy Art House

Bay Area composer/trumpeter/singer-songwriter Sarah Wilson performs with her Quintet — violinist Charlie Burnham, guitarist John Schott, bassist Jerome Harris, and drummer Matt Wilson, tonight at San Francisco's Red Poppy Art House on Folsom. Following her critically acclaimed 2010 album "Trapeze Project", Wilson's concerts have featured recent commissions Wilson received from The Center for Cultural Innovation and Zellerbach Family Foundation to write music in tribute to her female jazz mentors, Carla Bley, Laurie Frink and Myra Melford. “While I don't know Carla Bley personally, it was at her 1999 Knitting Factory concert that I finally saw a model for what I wanted to do...just be up there and have the focus be on my music,” says Wilson. “If these women hadn't paved the road for me, I never would've been able to do what I do. They made it possible for me to follow my musical path.”

Wilson has truly emerged as “one of the most intriguing and promising composers and trumpeters on the contemporary music scene..." Most recently she was one of 6 California composers awarded a prestigious Composers Collaborative grant from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

This grant will fund the world premiere of Wilson’s music production with dance, “Off the Walls” at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in fall 2012. Wilson will be a 2011-2012 Artist Fellow at the de Young Museum with funding from the James Irvine Foundation. Wilson earned wide acclaim for her 2006 Evander Music debut, Music for an Imaginary Play, as well as her most recent CD "Trapeze Project" (Brass Tonic Records).

Wilson didn’t come to music through the usual channels. As an undergraduate anthropology major at the University of California, Berkeley, Wilson, a lapsed high school trumpet player, took a strong interest in theater. A visiting artist from Vermont’s globe-trotting Bread and Puppet Theater inspired her to move east to work on their spectacular giant-puppet productions after graduation. She spent two years as a member of the troupe, increasingly conducting, arranging and performing music for their shows. In 1993, she moved to New York to concentrate on music, studying with trumpeters John McNeil and Laurie Frink.

Through her affiliation with Bread and Puppet Theater, she soon found herself musical director and composer of Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival’s annual puppet program. “At the time, I didn’t really have any formal training or experience composing,” Wilson says. “I didn’t know much harmony, so I would just write these melodic bass lines and layer contrapuntal melodies on top of them. I was really into Afro-Cuban music and Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman, so everything had a really strong rhythmic base, sometimes with odd meters. I’ve formally studied music since then, but my basic composing approach hasn’t changed much.”

“Because I started writing for puppet theater, there is a strong visual reference to my music, a kind of music to image to movement concept,” she continues. “When I compose I imagine myself in the music, picturing the image it evokes. It is also a visceral, physical feeling. Composing can be a kind of ecstatic experience for me, it's like finding the right movement for a puppet on stage, and by puppet I don't mean hand puppet, but the kind of big puppet we used in Bread and Puppet Theater, that requires use of your entire body. On a basic level, it's music you can dance to. That kind of a pulse is always there because that's where I get my inspiration.”

Wilson absorbed other sources of inspiration from the eclectic downtown New York new music scene of the 1990s into her compositions, and found plenty of open-minded musicians willing to play them. “I was fortunate to find these amazing musicians, like Kenny Wollesen, and Peck Allmond, Tony Scherr, and others,” she says, “who liked my work precisely because it was different and original.”

To further blur stylistic boundaries, Wilson began singing and writing her own songs in 2000. “My mom died that year, and I gave up the trumpet. I listened to the radio a lot and I started writing songs. It was distracting, soothing as I was dealing with this terrible loss in my life. Finally, I put together some songs, borrowed a microphone from Norah Jones (this was before she became famous, we were all scuffling then) and performed at Performance Space 122. I realized afterwards that singing gave me this intimate connection with the audience and I felt relaxed doing it. It is another avenue for my music to travel down. I don’t feel like I have any direct influences as a singer. It’s very pure.”

Trapeze Project brings together all the disparate elements of her career. “The title reflects how I felt moving from coast to coast,” says Wilson, who left New York in 2005 and moved back to California, “and also the way my music can swing back and forth between genres.” Indeed, the CD shows how she has absorbed and personalized many influences—American, Balkan, and Persian folk music; New Orleans jazz; marching bands; the blues; pop music; and other far-flung sources.

Wilson didn’t follow the path to creative music that most improvisers and composers take. But for her, that’s an asset. “My music is different because of how it was initially created,” she says. “People who play jazz or know jazz, often say that what I do isn’t jazz. Then other people say it sounds like jazz to them. I actually like being in this in-between space where I can do whatever I want.”

Sarah Wilson Quintet, Friday, September 16th
Red Poppy Art House, 2968 Folsom St., San Francisco
8 p.m. $12-$20 http://www.redpoppyarthouse.org