It’s telling that the strongest sections of Immanuel Wilkins’s SFJAZZ commission Recitations involved no text.
Premiering March 26 in the SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium, the ambitious evening-length work opened with a solo piece by organist Amina Claudine Myers, a magisterial artist rarely heard in the Bay Area. The 84-year-old New York resident, who was awarded the nation’s highest jazz honor as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2024, filled the room with a reverent tide of sound, deftly calibrating the organ stops as she leaned into the instrument’s role in sacred settings.
Her music expressed feelings that don’t easily take shape in words, engendering a sense of connection via sonic vibrations, shared ancestry, and gratitude for the respite, however brief, from the constant downpour of invective, discord and violence prevailing outside the theater.
The bulk of Recitations offered a very different response to past and present tribulations in the form of a 21-page booklet handed to the audience upon entering the theater. The mood shifted quickly from the ineffable to the starkly topical.
Saying he hoped to create a “site of intellectual rigor…We’re figuring it out together,” Wilkins, a commanding alto saxophonist, led the eight-piece band through some 60 minutes of mostly uneventful soundscape, accompanying recitation by Brontë Velez, who invited the audience to join in reading dense passages by the likes of Kwame Touré, Barbara Brown Taylor, Bayo Akomolafe, and Jasmine Johnson; Velez recited the passages in an uninflected monotone.
The concept quickly foundered, even before Velez finished half a page of welcome and benediction. Looking around the theater, I spotted only a handful of people who were still intoning the text, and many of them gave up in the statistics-laden second section about ICE arrests, a teletype account that keyed on repeating the lumpy phrase “according to data current as of February 7, 2026.”
Rather than distilling a few ideas down to the essence of a lyric or deploying repetition to allow the audience to absorb an idea, Wilkins and Velez offered a sprawling undergraduate course with all too predictable politics. It was both way too much and musically far too little, with few moments where the orchestration shifted to offer more transparency or openness in response to Velez’s voice.
Aside from the fact that ideological generalizations shut down rather than inspire dialogue, there’s no way to lead a group through a passage like: “Disclosure or exhibition is threatening to the relationship between us and the spirits we invoke within ritual. The problem with Western culture is that it is a show-off culture that intimidates. This is why it is generating so much death, loss and displacement.”
The unrelenting flow of words forced the music into the background. And attempting to recite with Velez made it impossible to comprehend the text, as one’s concentration was focused on reading rather than meaning.
Wilkins (who also played some keyboard) was joined by his working quartet: pianist and keyboardist Micah Thomas, bassist Ryoma Takenaga, and Oakland-reared drummer Savannah Harris. Special guests Holland Andrews on clarinet and vocals and guitarist Marvin Sewell, the only player who really had an opportunity to stretch out, thickened the textures.
The ensemble moved to the foreground for the first time in the concluding 20 minutes with a series of swirling, lapidary passages that seemed to respond to some of the images and ideas from the text. Myers was sadly underutilized. Time ran out at page 17, and Velez returned to recite a closing excerpt from poet Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere.”
The first major commission by SFJAZZ in years, Recitations may have been a disappointment, but it’s nevertheless the type of project the organization should be doing. At 28, Wilkins has created a stellar body of work as a leader and sideman. He’s an artist who’s earned the opportunity to try out, and hopefully rethink, big ideas
