Jazz pianist Emmet Cohen, who’s created a jazz performance series based in his New York apartment; is venturing on the road for an extended series of concerts in the Bay Area.Like thousands of other music fans, the first time I heard Samara Joy was at Emmet’s Place, an online jazz oasis that’s provided a steady flow of soul-nourishing music since the first months of the pandemic.
He’s farmed the broadcast out this month to the young Juilliard-trained New Jazz Underground trio while he hits the road, a tour that brings him to California for a three-night stand at UC Davis’s Mondavi Center with his organ quartet, May 16-18, featuring trumpeter Benny Benack III, tenor saxophonist Ruben Fox, and drummer Kyle Poole.
All the performances are sold out, but the Bach concert and 7 p.m. May 24 Joe Henderson Lab set will be, appropriately enough, livestreamed. In person or online, he’s a genial host fluent in a century-long array of piano idioms, including the demanding stride style perfected in Harlem gatherings designed to raise money for tenants.
He wanted the broadcast to echo the vibe he felt at the Upper West Side jazz spot Smoke, where he held down a weekly B3 gig for seven years before the pandemic. Opening up the stage at the end of the night, he turned Smoke into a proving ground for young players looking to break into the scene. In hindsight, the long-running gig provided his generation with a low-pressure situation “to work on our musical concepts,” he said.
Spending time with another jazz legend made his last SFJAZZ Center gig in 2019 particularly memorable, as pianist Ahmad Jamal was playing in Miner Auditorium and they ended up hanging out for a post-concert meal.