LINES Ballet’s 2025 Spring Season features choreographer Alonzo King’s first-ever collaboration with American jazz trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire—a spiritual seeker in the grand tradition of musical aspirationalists. Audiences will also have the opportunity to see King’s timeless work Scheherazade, which returns in full to the stage after over a decade.
Akinmusire has proved himself one of the most vital and deft trumpeters of his generation. “Every so often a trumpeter comes along who redraws the instrument’s role within jazz: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Chet Baker, Wynton Marsalis, Freddie Hubbard, etc. Ambrose Akinmusire has the potential to join that crowd,” wrote the All Music Guide. Akinmusire’s music overflows with both beauty and rigor, profound personal feeling, and fiery virtuoso playing. What one hears throughout his work is an artist plumbing the depths of himself and the world around him. According to The New York Times, “Ambrose Akinmusire has been making some of the most intimate spellbinding music of his career…even in its simplicity, Akinmusire’s trumpet can feel almost dangerously tender.”
Alonzo King’s Scheherazade is a re-envisioning of the ancient collection of Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic stories of One Thousand and One Nights. The exquisite dancers of LINES Ballet present a vision of the intimate transformative potential these stories possess: the way that we are offered a chance to listen to a voice that can change our lives, the power of art to illuminate all the chambers of our hearts. The new score by Grammy Award-winning tabla master Zakir Hussain re-interprets the original music by Rimsky-Korsakov, incorporating traditional Persian as well as Western instruments. Commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the Centenary of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s Scheherazade honors the company founder Serge Diaghilev’s spirit of cutting-edge artistic collaboration, immersing audiences in a luminescent and richly textured world.
Location
Blue Shield of California
Theater at Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts
700 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Cost
$42–$124
Ticket prices are inclusive of all fees.
PERFORMANCES | |
Saturday, May 10 | 7:30pm | |
Sunday, May 11 | 5pm | |
Thursday, May 15* | 7:30pm | |
Friday, May 16* | 7:30pm | |
Saturday, May 17** | 5:30pm | |
Sunday, May 18 | 5pm | |
*Post-Performance Q&A **Gala Performance |
During his 15-year career, Ambrose Akinmusire has paradoxically situated himself in both the center and the periphery of jazz, most recently emerging in classical and hip hop circles. He’s on a perpetual quest for new paradigms, masterfully weaving inspiration from other genres, arts, and life in general into compositions that are as poetic and graceful as they are bold and unflinching. His unorthodox approach to sound and composition make him a regular on critics polls and have earned him earned him grants and commissions from the Doris Duke Foundation, the MAP Fund, the Kennedy Center, The Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Monterey Jazz. While Akinmusire continues to garner accolades, his reach is always beyond—himself, his instrument, genre, form, preconceived notions, and anything else imposing limitations.
In 2007 Akinmusire won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, decided by a panel of judges that included Blanchard, Quincy Jones, Herb Alpert, Hugh Masekela, Clark Terry and Roy Hargrove. That year Akinmusire also won the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition and released his debut album Prelude…To Cora on the Fresh Sound label. He moved back to New York and began performing with the likes of Vijay Iyer, Aaron Parks, Esperanza Spalding and Jason Moran. It was also during this time that he first caught the attention of another discerning listener, Bruce Lundvall, President of Blue Note Records.
The pre-eminent classical tabla virtuoso of our time, Zakir Hussain is appreciated as one of the world’s most esteemed and influential musicians, one whose mastery of his percussion instrument has taken it to a new level, transcending cultures and national borders. A child prodigy who began his international touring career by the age of eighteen, Zakir has been at the helm of many genre-defying collaborations including Shakti, Remember Shakti, Masters of Percussion, Planet Drum, Tabla Beat Science and Sangam. His first album as a leader, Making Music, was released in 1987.
As a composer, he has scored music for numerous feature films, and has composed three concertos, the most recent enjoying the distinction as first-ever for tabla and orchestra. He is the recipient of countless awards, including 2 Grammys, Padma Bhushan, Padma Shri, Officier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters, and several honorary doctorates. Voted “Best Percussionist” by both the Downbeat Critics’ Poll and Modern Drummer’s Reader’s Poll over several years, Zakir was honored with SFJazz’s Lifetime Achievement Award at their 2017 Gala for his “unparalleled contribution to the world of music”. In 2022, he was named the Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy.
He is the founder and president of Moment Records, an independent record label presenting rare live concert recordings of Indian classical music and world music.
Paid parking is available at several garages nearby for our Fall Season 2024. The garages offering the closest access to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts are the following:
Yerba Buena Garage
Fifth + Mission
2700 Spaces
Moscone Garage
Moscone Center
710 Spaces
Hearst Parking Center
45 Third Street
806 Spaces