SFJazz Collective: Music of Miles Davis

Members who give $500+ annually receive 10% off concert tickets.

2017 will not offer many jazz albums so well thought out, so emotionally authentic, and so completely realized.

—JazzTimes

You can propose various definitions for what this band represents, but it’s a superbrain for what serious jazz sounds like now.

—New York Times

An all-star ensemble comprising eight of the finest performer/composers at work in jazz today, the SFJazz Collective’s mission each year is to perform fresh arrangements of works by a modern master and newly commissioned pieces by each Collective member. Through this pioneering approach, simultaneously honoring music’s greatest figures while championing jazz’s up-to-the-minute directions, the Collective embodies SFJazz’s commitment to jazz as a living, ever-relevant art form.

For the SFJazz Center’s fifth season, the Collective presents new arrangements of music by the genius jazz innovator Miles Davis and freshly minted compositions by the band. More than any other figure, Davis changed the sound of jazz—not once, but consistently over his career, from the birth of bebop in the 1940s to the integration of rock approaches that gave rise to the fusion movement in the 1970s. The SFJazz Collective highlights the trumpeter and composer’s immense diversity of expression, interpreting epochal work from Davis’s endlessly inventive songbook. The music from the Collective’s new album release, documenting the work of Miles Davis and original compositions, was recorded during season five and released in 2017.