Event Date
Benjamin Kreith and Hyeyung Sol Yoon, violins • Charlton Lee, viola • Kathryn Bates, cello
luminous yet corporeal (L.A. Times)
Program
- Edward Simon Guardian of the Oceans
- Julius Eastman: Gay Guerilla
Free, a Shinkoskey Noon Concert
About the Quartet
San Francisco's Del Sol Quartet believes that music can, and should, happen anywhere — screaming out Aeryn Santillan's Makeshift Memorials from a Mission District sidewalk or a rural high school, bouncing Ben Johnston's microtonal Americana off the canyon walls of the Yampa River or the hallowed walls of the Library of Congress, bringing Huang Ruo's Angel Island Oratorio home to the island detention barracks or across the Pacific to the Singapore International Arts Festival. Del Sol's performances provide the possibility for unexpected discovery, sparking dialogue and bringing people together.
Since 1992, Del Sol has commissioned or premiered hundreds of works by composers including Terry Riley, Tania León, Frederic Rzewski, Vijay Iyer, Mason Bates, Pamela Z, Chinary Ung, Chen Yi, Andy Akiho, Erberk Eryilmaz, Theresa Wong, and Reza Vali. They especially value their ongoing relationship with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in Boonville, California.
Huang Ruo: A Dust in Time, Del Sol's eleventh album, was described in the New York Times as "excavations of beauty from the elemental." Recent Del Sol recordings include The Resonance Between, a collaboration with North Indian musicians Alam Khan and Arjun Verma, and SPELLLING and The Mystery School with Oakland magical-futurist pop phenomenon SPELLLING, along with their podcast Sounds Current, an official selection of the Tribeca Festival.
About the Selections
Guardian of the Oceans was originally commissioned by SFJAZZ for the SFJAZZ Collective as part of a collaboration between SFJAZZ and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Each member of the Collective was invited to compose a new work in direct response to a work of visual art — a conversation across mediums, between the painted surface and the sounding world.
The work that inspired this composition was New Normal, a triptych by Bay Area artist Rupy C. Tut, featured in the de Young's exhibition About Place. Painted soon after the COVID-19 pandemic, Tut's triptych weaves together the overlapping crises of that moment — the disorientation of lockdown and the deepening urgency of the climate emergency. Its title carries a quiet, unsettling weight: the "new normal" we were urged to accept, even as the planet strained under pressures that preceded any single season of illness and would long outlast it.
Tut's imagery of layered time — past abundance, present disruption, uncertain future — shapes the music's architecture from the opening bars. The piece begins not with melody but with texture: extended techniques draw broad washes of white noise from the instruments, evoking the ocean as pure sound before any human theme enters. From within that sonic expanse, the suggestion of ocean life gradually takes form — the strings animating movement beneath the surface, conjuring a world both teeming and fragile. Only then does the main theme emerge, its contour distilled from the imagery of waves: a melodic line that rises and falls with the patient, unhurried motion of the sea.
Beneath this unfolding surface, the entire work rests on a repeating 16-bar harmonic cycle in G minor — a foundation as steady and relentless as the tides. It is against this anchoring constancy that the music shifts, fragments, and transforms, enacting the central tension of Tut's painting: the deep rhythms of the natural world persisting beneath the disruptions we have imposed upon it. The ocean does not disappear. It endures. And in enduring, it demands a reckoning.
The original version for the SFJAZZ Collective received its world premiere on October 25, 2024, and was recorded on the album Collective Imagery (SFJAZZ Records, 2024). A subsequent arrangement for jazz piano trio, string quartet, and bass clarinet was performed at the Presidio Theatre, San Francisco, on January 10, 2026. This string quartet arrangement was made at the request of the Del Sol Quartet, to whom it is dedicated.
About the Composers
Praised by DownBeat as “one of the strongest pianists of his generation,” awarding-winning artist and composer Edward Simon has become an irrepressible force in modern music. Throughout his accomplished career, the Venezuela-born Bay Area artist has refined his sound by exploring its pluralisms and by fostering global connections on and off the bandstand.
Grounded in the moment and wired for exploration, Simon’s expression leans into different styles from Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa and the United States, treating their elements and traditions as inextricably related and universal.
Simon’s collaborative spirit runs far and wide. Born in Punta Cardón, he arrived in New York City in 1988 and has lived in nearly every corner of the U.S., and in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He’s been a pivotal member of the SFJAZZ Collective since 2009, receiving more than 20 composer commissions. Winner of the 2017 NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Jazz Album for Latin American Songbook, Simon has appeared multiple times on The New York Times Top Ten Jazz Records of the Year list. He has worked with luminaries of every generation, including Paquito D’Rivera, Terence Blanchard, Becca Stevens, Bobby Watson, Herbie Mann, Magos Herrera, Don Byron, Scott Colley, Brian Blade, Luciana Souza, Adam Cruz, Mark Turner, Lucia Gutiérrez, Lage Lund, Donny McCaslin, Ignacio Berroa, Chris Potter, David Binney, Adam Rogers, Diane Reeves and John Patitucci, among countless others.
As a headliner, Simon has performed at the Village Vanguard, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club, SFJAZZ, Walton Arts Center, Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Detroit Jazz Festival, Earshot and Kuumbwa Jazz Center. As a core member of SFJAZZ Collective, he has appeared at iconic venues and events across the world, including Monterey Jazz Festival, Blue Note Tokyo, Birdland, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Amherst Fine Arts Center, The Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Segerstrom Center, Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale, Arizona, Disney Hall, Cite de la Musique in Paris and Berliner Philharmonie.
Julius Eastman (1940–90) was a prodigy pianist, virtuoso singer, and groundbreaking composer. He studied piano with Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute, recorded Peter Maxwell Davies vocal tour de force, Eight Songs For A Mad King, and formed part of the adventurous musical community in Buffalo, NY alongside Morton Feldman and Lukas Foss. Eastman’s later compositions often bear provocative titles that may have reflected — or contributed to — his increasing marginalization from the classical music establishment as a gay, Black man. In the 1980s Eastman experienced eviction, homelessness and drug dependence. He died alone in Buffalo at the age of 49. Recently, Eastman’s music has received increasing attention thanks to the advocacy of Mary Jane Leach, Luciano Chessa (Ph.D., music composition, UC Davis '04) and others.