Scottish Highland Gathering and Games

Men tossing tree trunks, hurling 16-pound hammers, sheepdogs a-leaping, Scottish dancers dancing, bagpipers piping, drummers drumming - no, it's not the 12 days of Christmas, it's the two days of the 144th Scottish Highland Gathering and Games, which takes place this Labor Day weekend at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

"There is literally going to be something for everyone," says Floyd Busby, spokesman for the Caledonian Club of San Francisco, which has organized this annual event since 1866.

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96 Hours: Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble

The strains of Latin jazz will heat up the city streets when the Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble plays this Sunday in Union Square as part of the ongoing free Jewels in the Square performances. Far from a kiddie show, this group of about 15 young musicians, who range in age from 10 to 18 years old, display a serious professionalism.

Founded in 2001 by Bay Area bandleader and San Francisco State University faculty member John Calloway along with Arturo Riera and Sylvia Ramirez, the ensemble boasts a resume that any professional would envy, including opening for jazz greats such as the Cuban bassist Israel "Cachao" López, and jamming with the likes of noted pianist Chuchito Valdés.

"It's quite an opportunity for a student musician," Ramirez says. "We are really unique - we've been around since 2001 and have never charged the students to participate. We recruit from all over the community, especially public schools, where kids may have a lot of natural talent and some training, but they might never have had access to private instruction in music."

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96 Hours Family: Grind for the Green's Eco-music conference

With President Obama pushing to create millions of new "green-collar" jobs, being eco-conscious might not just be a good idea, it may become a lucrative one as well. But buying organic, starting your own garden and living the sustainable life can be expensive, and for many people, it might feel as though the green movement is a nice but unavailable crusade that has all but passed them by.

"While certain parts of the Bay Area are very eco-conscious, for people in some parts of the city, like Bayview-Hunters Point, they just don't have access to some of the resources, the technology or information that would allow them to live in an ecologically conscious, self-sustaining way," says Ambessa Cantave, who with wife Zakiya Harris founded Grind for the Green in 2007, an organization dedicated to bringing ideas on how young people can shape a green future for themselves and practical resources for sustainable living to underserved communities.

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Global perspective at S.F. Arts Festival

Multiculturalism is the watchword at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which runs Wednesday through June 8 at a dozen venues around the city and will feature artists from China, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, Spain, Germany and Croatia, side by side with such mainstays of the local arts scene as Joe Goode, Axis Dance Company, John Santos and Earplay. But while the out-of-town visitors are an appealing part of the 5-year-old festival, the brainchild of director Andrew Wood, it also, perhaps even more important, serves as a proving ground for international collaborations and a way of encouraging Bay Area artists to seek out inspirations abroad and bring back fresh ideas to their home base.

Whether through an existing project, like Kim Epifano's collaboration with Shanghai artists on "Speaking Chinese," or an outgrowth of an existing relationship, such as Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt's work with Berlin choreographer Sommer Ulrickson on "Yes, Yes to Moscow," or even a reason to fulfill a commission, like Erling Wold's one-man opera for John Duykers, the festival gives performers a venue and springboard for exploring outside their comfort zones.

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SF Symphony's Adventures in Music program

It's a 'snare guitar,' " one little girl says quite matter-of-factly. Four girls from Julianne Eng's fourth- and fifth-grade class explain the ins and outs of their newest creation, pointing out main features of the design on their drawing, "It's got a button for turning on the snare drum at the top and an amp built in at the bottom - and it's solar-powered."

Eng puts on a CD and Saint-Saëns' Algerian Suite thumps mildly in the background amid the chatter of young voices. While the girls continue embellishing the neck of their snare guitar with flames that would make Ted Nugent proud, the other kids in the comfortably cluttered room at Argonne Alternative Elementary in the Richmond District of San Francisco are working on their own fascinating menagerie of instruments - a "viano," a "clarolin," "drymbals" and other exotic inventions, which they describe with varying degrees of technical detail. One pair of girls is carefully copyrighting their instrument's description, and they casually, but deftly, turn the paper over when I come closer to have a look.

As the kids themselves are quick to explain, it's all part of the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music, one of the most ambitious music education outreach programs in the nation, and one that aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the San Francisco Unified School District.

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Arielle Jacobs stars in High School Musical

If the producers of the national tour of "High School Musical" were trying to dream up the right actress for the role of Gabriella Montez - the smart, quiet newcomer to East High School who aspires to break free and sing in the school musical - they could hardly have asked for a more perfect match than Arielle Jacobs.

A native of Half Moon Bay, Jacobs was 14 when she moved with her family from California to Princeton, N.J., just as she was to start high school, so she knows what it's like to be the new girl in town.

"Fortunately for me, there were two middle schools in Princeton," she says, laughing. "So everyone just thought I was from the other middle school."

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High School Musical hits the Orpheum stage

If you fall into the post-tween age group, your experience of a little phenomenon called "High School Musical" might be limited. But say "We're all in this together" to anyone between the ages of 9 and 13, and you're likely to get a rousing chorus of one of "High School Musical's" nine chart-topping songs and probably a few fancy hip-hop moves to go along with it.

One of the Disney Channel's most popular movies, "High School Musical" has garnered hundreds of millions of young fans around the world in the past two years. The movie's soundtrack went quadruple platinum, and last year a rock-concert-style tour featuring the film's stars sold out in 40 cities, with the Beatlemania-esque shrieks of young fans shattering eardrums across North America.

The rousing popularity of the movie has spun off one sequel already, another is in the works for this summer and there's even an ice-show version making its way around the world. Now, for those who just can't get enough of the story of handsome jock Troy Bolton, shy, bookish Gabriella Montez and their struggle to break free of stereotypes and win roles in the school musical, the high-energy, Broadway-style stage production of "High School Musical" comes to San Francisco, opening Tuesday at the Orpheum Theatre.

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SF Symphony: Messiaen's L'Ascension

Every so often we get to the Symphony in between dance performances, and we didn't want to miss out on a chance to hear some Messiaen. So on a dreadfully drippy night, we squished in our soaked shoes over to Davies to hear Myung-Whun Chung conduct the San Francisco Symphony.

Messiaen is, for me, always a bit of a mixed experience. Sometimes I don't know what to make of him, sometimes I'm just blown away. L'Ascension is certainly not an easy work-- it moves through four movements at a glacial pace, and yet, Chung managed to uncover fantastic, spine-tingling episodes in the Alleluias. I found myself completely absorbed in a sort of frozen moment in time, which I guess, is Messiaen's mission.

By contrast, Chung's Mahler was a mixed bag for me. Bringing Mahler to SF is like coals to Newcastle, and I'm very much attached to MTT's interpretation, which seems to "sing" more than the version we heard on Friday night.

Chung takes the "Langsam. Schleppend" (Slow. Dragging.) directive quite literally-- to the point of schlepping dullness for me. It seems his motive is to create a contrast with the frenzied pace that he takes in the accelerandos, which was in some ways effective, but also started to sound schizophrenic to me. Who is this crazy guy whipping the musicians around up there?

By the third movement, the orchestra had taken on a richer slow burn-- a tone set by Scott Pingel's burnished double bass solo. Chung eschews the breathy "wait for it..." pauses that MTT takes, and to which I've grown accustomed, and it's a bit of a pity, because I think that his fourth movement lacks a certain logic-- under his baton, the symphony plays beautifully -- but it is just not as expressive an organism.

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Choral Society gives students a venue for their talent

In cascading echoes, a wave of voices emerges from inside Lakeside Presbyterian Church, "What a handsome young man! And he's single we hear!"

The church's inner sanctuary has become the site of a sprightly English country ball as the San Francisco Choral Society cheerfully rehearses the first scene of Kirke Mechem's new opera, "Pride and Prejudice," an excerpt of which it will premiere at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday and Saturday.

This review first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Music Review : John Santos and the Machete Ensemble: The Farewell Concert

It kinda started in your ribs -- just a little tic from side to side that happened reflexively as the Machete Ensemble sent the first notes into the air. Pretty soon it moved into the tip of your shoulders -- just a bit of a bounce. And that set your head nodding in time with the beat. Before long, you found yourself swinging and swaying in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater's groovy reclining seats, which luckily left a lot of leg room in front, in case you wanted to ... you know ... get up and dance. Which most people did.

It seemed like everyone who was ever part of the San Francisco Latin jazz scene was on hand to bid adios to John Santos' Machete Ensemble, which disbanded in a blowout concert on November 12 after twenty-one years of turning up the Afro-Latin heat in the Bay Area.

All night long, a parade of former Machete members as well as friends and family came up on the stage to jam with the core group of Macheteros -- Orlando Torriente on vocals, John Calloway on flute, Ron Stallings and Melecio Magdaluyo on saxes and clarinet, Wayne Wallace on trombone, Murray Low on piano, David Belove on bass, Paul van Wageningen on drums and Orestes Vilató on just about everything else. And sitting in the middle of it all was the genial, chatty Santos himself, on the congas emblazoned with red, white and blue "Impeach Bush" stickers -- as charming as ever, although, as he admitted, talking a little faster than usual so as to fit in all the fun in a brief amount of time.

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Music Review : SF Jazz Festival: Kamikaze Ground Crew

For their first performance back in the Bay Area in 13 years, the Kamikaze Ground Crew got a warm welcome at the Great American Music Hall at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. After all, it's really a hometown crowd for the seven-member band, most of whom still have local ties, even though the crew is largely based now in New York.

It's a loose knit group of talent -- all of them involved in lots of other projects. Co-founders Doug Wieselman and Gina Leishman both write music for dance and theater -- the latter most recently composing scores for Berkeley Rep's Mother Courage and Cal Shakes' As You Like It -- and trumpet-player Steven Bernstein and Kenny Wolleson head their own rollicking band Sex Mob. In fact, a majority of the compositions that the KGC unveiled on Wednesday night, came courtesy of Leishman and Bernstein, but those looking for the exuberance of Sex Mob, or the witty, light touch of Leishman's Shakespearean songs like "It was a lover and his lass" would have been confused at the start.

What seems clear is that in the years since KGC's start as the pit band for the Flying Karamazov Brothers, a lot of experimenting has been going on. So it was that some of what we got that night was esoteric, some of it impenetrable, while other pieces were lively and even antic. All put together, though, it made for a program that suffered from uneven pacing.

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Music Review : SF Jazz Festival: Arturo Sandoval

What is it about los Cubanos? Artists like Los Carpinteros craft incredibly sculpted social critiques. Dancers such as Carlos Acosta, the Carreno clan and the Feijoo sisters have stormed the ballet world. And their musicians -- their musicians always rock the house.

The audience in the Herbst Theater was primed from the outset when trumpet master Arturo Sandoval took the spotlight at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. And if there was any disappointment that evening, it was that the show had to end some time.

Backed by a tight-knit quintet that included Ed Calle on sax, Javier Concepcion on keyboards, Armando Gola on bass, Tomasito Cruz on congas and Alexis Arce on drums, Sandoval hit the stage at a blistering pace, dispatching double digit high notes on his trumpet solos with almost irritating ease.

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Theater Review: Stew's "Passing Strange"

"Stew" is a great moniker for the rock musician-poet-filmmaker, all-around-performing-artist, whose Passing Strange made its bow last week at Berkeley Rep. He's a rich mix of flavors, a bubbling cauldron of ideas and talents, and his latest effort, which takes an autobiographical look at his development as a young black musician, is a kind of spicy recipe based on his life. Some of the ingredients might seem improbable, but the final dish is worth savoring.

Passing Strange takes its title from Othello's description of how he won Desdemona's heart. But as with much of the wordsmithy in this play -- which Stew and partner Heidi Rodewald first developed at the Sundance Institute and which will move on to New York's Public Theater after the Berkeley run -- "passing" is meant to encompass numerous other meanings: passing for white or passing for black, being passed up, passing through, passing on. The word itself has a sense of restlessness that is reflected in the rhythm of the play as well as the music, as it follows Stew's youthful escapades -- a Baptist upbringing in LA and coming of age amidst rarefied surroundings in Amsterdam and Berlin.

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KQED Profile: Gang Situ

"Actually, I hate to use the words, 'East meets West.' We're getting closer. I see these lines ... disappearing."

-- Gang Situ

Music is in the blood for composer Gang Situ, whose mother was a mezzo-soprano with the Shanghai Opera and whose father was the music director and conductor of the Shanghai Philharmonic. Born in 1954 in Shanghai, Situ studied piano and violin at an early age. But as a teenager, Situ -- whose given name means "steel" -- was swept up in China's Cultural Revolution and was sent for a four-year "reeducation" that found him harvesting rice and gathering firewood in the countryside. Ironically, the experience would indirectly bolster his love of music, as he and his fellow workers would secretly listen to banned recordings of Western artists, such as David Oistrakh playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.

In 1985, Situ arrived in the United States. He had only $40 to his name and spoke only a few words of English. By 1994, just nine years later, he had attracted notice as a composer with his Double Concerto for Violin and Erhu, which has since been performed by more than a dozen orchestras around the world, including the San Francisco Symphony.


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