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.
Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.
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