With her marriage dissolving, a full plate of work, and a general sense that things were falling apart, the highly regarded jazz pianist Sumi Tonooka had little appetite for plunging into a new musical pool.
But her friend and close musical compatriot, saxophonist Erica Lindsey, felt she was a perfect candidate for the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, a new program designed to foster connections between jazz composers and symphony orchestras.
Lindsay had been selected for the JCOI’s inaugural session in 2012, “and she kept urging me to apply,” said Tonooka, 67, speaking by phone from her home in Philadelphia. “It was a crazy time in my life and I didn’t feel very confident in my own work.”
Ready to set aside the application, which required submitting a composition, Tonooka called Lindsay the day before the deadline, “but I said you’ve got to do it,” Lindsay recalled.
Tonooka didn’t just get accepted into the JCOI. She was one of a few composers in the program whose work was selected for a premiere, which led to the American Composers Orchestra presenting her piece “Full Circle” in New York City.
The experience set her on a new path that has led to a series of prestigious commissions, including a work premiered last February by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra. Commissioned as part of the Emerging Black Composers Project, the piece taps into Tonooka’s Japanese and African American heritage, drawing on the Sonia Sanchez poem “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman.”
In her first Northern California appearance as a pianist since the 1993 Monterey Jazz Festival, Tonooka performs Nov. 18 at SFJAZZ’s Joe Henderson Lab and Nov. 20 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center with Alchemy Sound Project, a group that coalesced during her JCOI residency at UCLA.
The multi-generational chamber jazz ensemble includes Detroit-reared Salim Washington, a commanding improviser on tenor sax, flute, oboe and bass clarinet, who just traded a faculty position at South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal for a professorship at UCLA.
The Project also includes trumpeter Samantha Boshnack, who leads several notable ensembles on Seattle’s creatively charged jazz scene, and Los Angeles bassist David Arend, a longtime member of the Oakland Symphony, who works across classical, jazz, electronic, avant-garde and singer/songwriter settings.
The idea for Alchemy Sound Project came to Tonooka in the midst of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute residency “hanging out with the other composers during our free time,” she said.
“I was thinking, what if we wrote for each other and learned and performed each other’s music?” Tonooka said. “The idea was to give ourselves a community, even a small one, to develop our own work.”
Tonooka also recruited Lindsay, with whom she was already co-leading a quartet that records for the label they co-founded, Artists Recording Collective, or ARC. A San Francisco native and longtime New York resident, Lindsay is an artist-in-residence at Bard College, where she teaches jazz music theory, arranging and composition.
“What I like about writing for that group is that I can explore a more narrative form than you can when you’re writing a tune for a regular gig,” Lindsay said. “You can start one place and go on a journey. A lot of things I’ve written for Alchemy are through-composed, and I set up open spaces for improvisation.”
The ensemble’s evident diversity contains inconspicuous ties, like the fact that Boshnack and the group’s latest member, trombonist Michael Ventoso, were students of Lindsay’s at Bard.
Tonooka’s jazz education took place mostly on the bandstand. By 17, she was writing prolifically for a trio she was leading around Philadelphia featuring future bass star Jamaaladeen Tacuma. Philly Joe Jones, the drum great who powered Miles Davis’s first classic quintet, was so impressed he recruited her for a two-year stint in his band.
Moving to New York City in 1983, Tonooka gained considerable attention as a major new voice, eventually making her recording debut as a leader on 1990’s “With an Open Heart,” a trio session with bassist Rufus Reid and Palo Alto-raised drummer Akira Tana.
Before she started down the orchestral path, Tonooka had also composed scores for about 20 films. For Alchemy Sound Project’s first tour, the group is focusing on new pieces Tonooka wrote for Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works program.
While not exactly a suite, the “interconnected pieces were inspired by a book I read during the pandemic lockdown, Richard Powers ‘The Overstory,’ which described a process that trees have to feed each other underground,” she said. ‘It’s a great metaphor for what community is. We have to do the same thing to survive.”
Tonooka will be back in the Bay Area next month to perform when the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra presents the world premiere of her Emerging Black Composer Project-commissioned “Sketch at Seven” Dec. 29 at St Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco, Dec. 31 at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, and Jan. 1 at Palo Alto’s First United Methodist Church.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
SUMI TONOOKA TRIO
Performing with Alchemy Sound Project
When & where: 7 and 8:30 p.m. Nov. 18 at SFJazz Center, San Francisco; $30, www.sfjazz.org; 7 p.m. Nov. 20 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $36.75-$42; www.kuumbwajazz.org
