If the Flower Piano festival was looking for an act that summed up its open-to-all aesthetic, they found it in the Kev Choice Ensemble. The multi-genre group, fronted by its namesake pianist, closed out the two-week farewell to summer on Sunday, Sept. 21 at the outdoor “Flower Piano Lounge” in the San Francisco Botanical Garden inside Golden Gate Park.
Choice himself represents a blend of styles in his piano playing and his repertoire. Trained in jazz and classical music at Xavier University and then Southern Illinois University, at heart he’s still an Oakland guy who grew up in the late 1980s and 1990s to a soundtrack of hip-hop and his parents’ old vinyl. That’s his artistic core: “Before I went international, I was on East 14th,” he raps in one number.
But Choice stretches rap formally, by creating long jazz or even classical intros and breaks. As a teacher and a Black artist, Choice is also aware of the long legacy of African American musical achievement that he, in a sense, embodies. His Flower Piano set included an instrumental version of Stevie Wonder’s “Rocket Love” that veered heavily into jazz improv as he extended and varied the song’s refrain. He also did a medley of classic hip-hop songs from the 1990s, like Tupac Shakur’s “Ambitionz az a Ridah” (1996).
Appropriately for a teacher (at San Francisco State’s School of Music), Choice’s original songs often contextualize his own experience within a historical frame. One of the early numbers of the set, “1852,” narrates a history of Oakland in four concise verses, from the Ohlone and the colonizing Spanish to postwar hard times to the 1980s crack epidemic, and then delivering the message: “You don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re at.”
Maybe that’s easy for the vice chair of Oakland's Cultural Affairs Commission, but it seemed intended as an example of how the hip-hop genre can be (and has been) used to inspire and instruct. Choice said as much in a short monologue in which he suggested we should acknowledge the cultural significance of rap with the same respect we give to great classical and jazz artists. To this writer, who cannot claim any expertise in — or much experience of — hip-hop, it was an impressive performance from a musician who is both morally grounded and assertive, and in touch with all the aspects of his life from fame to fatherhood.
But I was there to hear the composer that conductor Michael Morgan had nudged into creating a work (Soul Restoration Suite, 2018) for the Oakland Symphony, and Choice complied. He began the whole show with a classical piano solo of the famous hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” an arrangement which touched lightly on Ray Charles’s famous recording.
Fulfilling a longtime wish, Choice performed with an expanded ensemble that included drummer John Omayga Adams, bassist Kenshay Brown, and R&B vocalist Lauren Adams (professionally known as SoLauren), but also a string quartet. Choice used that classical ensemble liberally, often bringing them to the fore even in the hip-hop numbers.
The climax of the program came with “Movements” (2020), a piece commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for its online Currents series, curated by Morgan and later released on SFS Media in 2021. Even in this reduced score version (the original is for 15 instruments), there’s a lot going on. The title is a pun on the musical term, which is also embedded in the socially conscious refrain conceived in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, “It’s a movement not a moment.”
The piece is mainly an artistic credo, though, in which the rap lyrics are enveloped in a vibrant string melody backed by rhythm instruments, but lacking processed hip-hop beats. “I free the people with these conscious concertos / I conduct like Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad / Or MTT with a baton and a score to settle.” As the rhymes and the wordplay pile up the melody climbs higher in response. Its flow meets symphonic elaboration. That’s what Choice is after and though the song is only five-and-a-half minutes in duration, it’s exhilarating and epic. And that’s a great way to finish a festival and a summer.
