{"id":83144,"date":"2025-12-05T20:02:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T20:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/83144\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T20:02:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T20:02:06","slug":"sasha-berliner-returns-to-bay-area-as-a-rising-star-in-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/83144\/","title":{"rendered":"Sasha Berliner returns to Bay Area as a rising star in jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco-reared vibraphonist Sasha Berliner<\/a> finds herself at the crest of two waves in the music business.<\/p>\n

For one, she\u2019s a leading force on an instrument that has been embraced<\/a> by a brilliant cadre of young players, taking the vibes from the margins to the center of the contemporary jazz scene. Meanwhile, she\u2019s part of a wave of young jazz artists who\u2019ve relocated from New York City to Los Angeles<\/a>, transforming the Southland scene.<\/p>\n

Thriving as a player, bandleader, collaborator and educator, she returns to the Bay Area several times in the coming weeks for a series of gigs, performing in different contexts with bands that reflect L.A.\u2019s rise as a 21st-century jazz mecca.<\/p>\n

Her Bay Area engagements start Dec. 7 at Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society<\/a> in Half Moon Bay with a quintet featuring Bay Area bassist Giulio Xavier Cetto and the L.A. tandem of pianist Javier Santiago and drummer Anthony Fung, both graduates of the prestigious Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz at UCLA.<\/p>\n

Rounding out the group is trumpeter Anthony Hervey, a New York connection of Berliner\u2019s who recently took a position at San Francisco Conservatory\u2019s Roots, Jazz and American Music program<\/a>. The performance will also be live-streamed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnthony happened to be there when this gig was coming around and the Bach people really wanted me to bring in a quintet,\u201d said Berliner, 27. \u201cHe\u2019s an amazing player. We\u2019ve actually never played together but there was a while when we were seeing each other around the world, in L.A., the Netherlands or Belin, but never New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

She returns to the Bay Area for a Dec. 27 Miner Auditorium double bill as part of SFJAZZ Executive Artistic Director Terence Blanchard\u2019s UpSwing Series on a program with the stellar vocalist Michael Mayo. She\u2019s again joined by Cetto on acoustic and electric bass and Santiago on piano, players who\u2019ve worked widely together in duo, trio and larger configurations. Drummer Myles Martin and saxophonist Tristan Cappel round out this quintet.<\/p>\n

She met Martin in L.A. and he played on her April album release gigs for her new album \u201cFant\u00f4me.\u201d Santiago has performed with her several times, \u201cand it\u2019s great to have musicians who\u2019ve played your music before,\u201d she said. She used to run into Cappel when they both lived in New York and has reconnected with him in L.A.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s really sweet and nice to work with,\u201d Berliner said. \u201cHe can play alto sax, flute, and bass clarinet, and add a lot of colors.\u201d<\/p>\n

She concludes the spate of Bay Area shows with a Stanford Live performance at The Studio Jan. 17. Rather than a quintet it\u2019s a duo concert with piano star Paul Cornish, who\u2019s been performing internationally with saxophonist Joshua Redman and recently released his debut album on Blue Note Records, \u201cYou\u2019re Exaggerating!\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve known each other for several years. Like Berliner, Cornish relocated from New York to Los Angeles. \u201cHe\u2019s made such a name for himself,\u201d Berliner said. \u201cPaul has such a unique sound. It\u2019s cool he\u2019s pioneered his owns style. We did a duo show at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival last year and wanted another opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The piano\/vibes duo is a format inextricably linked to Chick Corea and Gary Burton, who recorded a series of popular ECM albums together starting with 1973\u2019s \u201cCrystal Silence.\u201d Burton was one of Berlin\u2019s early influences, and in the duo setting she tends to play with four mallets, a Burton trademark, \u201cso it could conjure that kind of vibe,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we did Chick\u2019s \u2018Windows\u2019 at Healdsburg, but Paul\u2019s comps are nothing like his. It\u2019s its own thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

She and Cornish are also linked as fellow members of the music faculty at UC Irvine, a position she\u2019s held since 2023. It\u2019s not a school known for its jazz program, \u201cand there are a lot of non-jazz majors, which brings a different perspective,\u201d she said. \u201cI like students interested in multiple things as long as they\u2019re working hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hard work has been the hallmark of her rise to prominence, an ethic that has led to international collaborations like a September concert with the storied German jazz outfit the Frankfurt Radio Big Band featuring arrangements of her compositions.<\/p>\n

In October, graduate students at the Amsterdam Conservatory presented a concert of her music, and at Boston\u2019s Berklee College of Music concluded a seminar focusing on her compositions with a program by the Sasha Berliner Berklee Ensemble.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a dizzying schedule that doesn\u2019t seem likely to slow down anytime soon.\u00a0With jazz stars like Christian McBride, C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant and Tyshawn Sorey calling her for gigs, every new challenge sharpens an artist who has sliced through the noise to flourish as a full-spectrum creative force.<\/p>\n

Contact Andrew Gilbert at\u00a0jazzscribe@aol.com.<\/p>\n

SASHA BERLINER<\/p>\n

When & where: 4:30 p.m. Dec. 7 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $40-$50 ($12 livestream); bachddsoc.org; 7:30 p.m. Dec. 27 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $44.50-$94.50; www.sfjazz.org; 7 p.m. Jan. 17 at The Studio at Stanford University; $30.24-$54; live.stanford.edu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco-reared vibraphonist Sasha Berliner finds herself at the crest of two waves in the music business. For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[967,12853,181,971,330,101,103,102,104,106,105,420],"class_list":{"0":"post-83144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-jazz","10":"tag-latest-headlines","11":"tag-lifestyle","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-san-francisco","14":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","15":"tag-san-francisco-news","16":"tag-sf","17":"tag-sf-headlines","18":"tag-sf-news","19":"tag-things-to-do"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}