Pianist Billy Childs back in Bay Area to spotlight ‘Winds of Change’
Pianist, composer Billy Childs is back performing with a quartet for his new album "Winds of Change," which he will spotlight with 2 Bay Area shows.
Long before Billy Childs gained recognition as one of country’s preeminent composers he was dazzling Bay Area audiences as a sideman.
Playing Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society April 30 and Kuumbwa Jazz Center May 1 with a quartet featuring trumpet star Sean Jones, the Los Angeles pianist is returning to the venues where he first made an indelible impression four decades ago.
After a brief stint with trombone great J.J. Johnson, Childs started regular treks north when trumpet star Freddie Hubbard assembled a prodigious young band in 1978 that also featured bassist Larry Klein (who earned greater renown producing albums by Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Luciana Souza, and Childs’ own 2014 jazz-chart topping project “Map of the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro”).
After years of playing funk and fusion, Hubbard had returned to straight ahead jazz sounding more fiery than ever. For Childs, who was in his early 20s, heading upstate to perform at Keystone Korner in North Beach, Kuumbwa and Bach with Hubbard’s band was trial by blowtorch on every gig, “playing this great music with this incredible master,” he said. “The whole experience was incredibly exciting.”
He’s been making trips north ever since, both as an accompanist for masters such as Bobby Hutcherson and Dianne Reeves, as well as leading his own bands, giving audiences here regular updates on his evolution as an improviser, composer and arranger. The quartet he brings this time features bassist Hans Glawischnig and Christian Euman, “a brilliant drummer in his early 30s who plays with Jacob Collier and the Le Boeuf Brothers,” said Childs, 66.
Focusing on music from a recent new Mack Avenue album “The Winds of Change,” he’s forging a new relationship with trumpeter Sean Jones, a former member of the SFJAZZ Collective (2015-2017) who’s now the chair of the Peabody Institute’s jazz studies department. Childs brings the same group to the Monterey Jazz Festival in September.
After a series of recordings featuring vocals and expanded instrumentation, including three albums that garnered Grammy Awards, he returned to the quartet format with a series of pieces that draw on film scores and the exquisite 1975 ECM album by Canadian flugelhornist Kenny Wheeler (featuring Keith Jarrett on his last date as a sideman).
“The conversation and beauty, the way they interact and the compositions are magical,” Childs said. “I want that kind of conversation.”
For “Winds of Change,” Childs recruited the superlative rhythm section team of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade with Ambrose Akinmusire, because the Berkeley trumpeter “has this really distinctive, soft velvety round sound that fits in with the sound I was looking for,” Childs said. “Though Hans and Christian and Sean could have been the people on the album, and it would have been just as beautiful.”
The other primary sources inspiring his new “Winds of Change” pieces were Bernard Herrmann’s and Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic themes for the mid-70s films “Taxi Driver” and “Chinatown,” respectively, “one describing a mystical urban vision of New York and the other romanticizing this vision of Los Angeles,” Childs said.
“When I think of those cities those themes come to my mind. And Jack Nicholas in his suit and De Niro in his taxi with the lights blurring in the rain. I wanted to turn the trio into an orchestral unit as a piece for trumpet and orchestra.”
Writing for orchestras and chamber ensembles has actually become Childs’ bread and butter over the past two decades. He’s an anomaly in jazz and classical music as a composer who makes a living via commissions. Writing became a lifeline during the first three years of the pandemic when he didn’t play a single in-person performance (a drought that ended last October with two nights at the California Jazz Conservatory).
A composition course he was teaching at Berklee College of Music turned into an extended online gig that just concluded last month, but otherwise he threw all of his attention into his second violin concerto, which was commissioned by renowned violinist Rachel Barton Pine. She ended up premiering the concerto last summer at Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival and several other high profile events, including a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.
“Since I had no other writing project, I invested myself totally in that,” Childs said. “I had to write this piece even though I didn’t know when and if it would be played.”
The commissions have poured in since then, including an alto saxophone concerto that Steven Banks premiered in February with the Kansas City Symphony.
“What I do is so out of the norm, making a living composing with classical commissions,” he said. It’s a situation that makes every jazz gig that much more precious.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
BILLY CHILDS
When & where: 4:30 p.m. April 30; at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $35-$45 (livestream $10); bachddsoc.org; 7 p.m. May 1; Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $23.50-$42; 831-427-2227, www.kuumbwajazz.org