Jeff Kaliss

Jeff Kaliss has featured and reviewed classical, jazz, rock, and world musics and other entertainment for the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other regional, national, international, and web-based publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, is a published poet, and is the author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone (Backbeat Books) and numerous textbook and encyclopedia entries, album liner notes, and festival program notes.

Articles By This Author

coyne.jpg
Review

Shooting Freely, and Mostly Hitting the Mark

Jeff Kaliss - February 22, 2010
An infrequently mounted masterpiece, bounteous with beautiful and dramatic passages, and delivered by a cast headed by fine principal voices, forms a strong foundation for edifying opera.
Kronos Quartet: Music From 4 Fences
Preview

Good Fences Make Good Music

Jeff Kaliss - February 16, 2010
On tour with the Kronos Quartet and anticipating a phone interview with SFCV, David Harrington found himself thinking about barbed wire fences.
cypressnew_wide_0.jpg
Preview

Ruehr’s Novel ‘Response’ to Cypress’ ‘Call’

Jeff Kaliss - February 1, 2010
For its “Call & Response” program this year, San Francisco’s Cypress String Quartet is returning to a composer friend whom they’d commissioned earlier in the program’s 11-year history. That’s Elena Ruehr, who came out from Boston last month to work with the ensemble on her String Quartet No. 5, premiering at the end of February at Herbst Theatre.
quartetovivace.jpg
Preview

Tasty Mix From Quarteto Vivace Brasil

Jeff Kaliss - January 19, 2010
Flautist Tadeu Coelho is finding, on his group’s first tour of the U.S., that American musical palates are pleased by a healthy mix of genres. He believes that his fellow Brazilians are endemically suited to serving up eclecticism.

“It has to do with our heritage,” Coelho points out. “We are a very mixed population, from African, European, Japanese, and native Indian.

Play It Again, Steve Reich

Jeff Kaliss - January 11, 2010
In the middle of an extended weekend’s showcase by Stanford Lively Arts, composer Steve Reich sat down in a hotel lobby to talk about his five decades of exploration in the musical outback.
kronosqtetNEW_wide_0.jpg
Preview

Kronos Ventures Through China

Jeff Kaliss - January 4, 2010
David Harrington points out that a lot of musicians don’t “play” music, but that he’s always wanted to have fun with what he does as founder of and violinist with the Kronos Quartet. He spent his New Year’s Eve morning playing a kelp horn and a dripping water drum created by San Francisco composer and performer Cheryl Leonard, and chatting with San Francisco City College student and electronic sou
reich.steve3.2.jpg
Preview

So Percussion Showcases Steve Reich

Jeff Kaliss - December 17, 2009
Working closely with Steve Reich, percussionist Adam Sliwinski realized that the powerful pulse that propels Reich’s music seems embodied by the septuagenarian composer himself.

Triple Play at Café Du Nord

Jeff Kaliss - November 17, 2009
Two things in common among the three acts to be featured at San Francisco’s Café du Nord at the end of November are telegraphed in the hyphen-heavy of the Classical Revolution event: “A Triple-Bill of Post-Classical Composer Ensembles.” But there’s a third, perhaps more revealing element. All three composers — Matt McBane, George Hurd, and Jack Curtis Dubowsky — have written for film.
hodgson_david.jpg
Review

An Intimate Bohème From West Bay Opera

Jeff Kaliss - October 19, 2009
Giacomo Puccini often chose settings that brought opera up close and personal, and he thus worked vital changes on the form and made it ready for the 20th century.
BQE3.2.jpg
Review

Wild Ride Through Brooklyn

Jeff Kaliss - October 13, 2009

The music of this CD/DVD is easier on the ear than the concept is easy on the mind. But that doesn’t obviate the importance of, and the potential pleasure in, embracing the full intent of the creator, Sufjan Stevens.