Summer at SFJAZZ: Integrity Suites, High Flyers, and Psychedelic Beats

A staycation at SFJAZZ this July and August gets you a variety of delights you’d have a hard time finding on vacation anywhere else, including performances from Steven Bernstein, Lettuce, Logan Richardson, Yilian Cañizares, Monsieur Periné, Take 6, and Brad Mehldau.

On July 14th and 15th, a few days after our nation’s 250th birthday, Wynton Marsalis will bring his timely Integrity Suite to the Miner Auditorium. “I wrote it several years ago,” he points out in a recent interview. “The movements of the suite are: No Surrender, Point Counterpoint, Something About Belief, and The Struggle to Become Aware.” Integrity Suite debuted in a performance for the US Supreme Court, but that was prior to the recurrence of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Now in his last year as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the parent of a two-year-old, Elsie, with violinist wife Nicola Bendetti, the 64-year-old Marsalis is excited to be showcasing at SFJAZZ a septet, “with fantastic younger musicians we hadn’t previously played with, letting people hear these new voices in that sound and style. We have the ability to play everything from the whole sweep of jazz, everything from New Orleans music to the new suite. You’ve got the clarinet, the trombone, four horns, and three-part harmony. So you can write with the close-knit voicings of the saxophone section of a big band.”

Like Marsalis, Daniel Villarreal is a man of many hats, aside from the trademark flat-brimmed Stetson he acquired in Chicago, one of several cities he stayed in while evolving his tangy fusion of Latin, jazz, funk, soul and rock. It may surprise fans attending Villarreal’s SFJAZZ shows on July 23rd & 24th that the drummer and percussionist’s earliest music-making was in punk in his native Panama, due to the time and the influence of US Armed Forces.

“The bases had the best skate parks,” Villarreal relates. “And I was born in ‘77, I was a skateboarder, and punk was the music of skateboarding.” He expanded his percussive rhythm set under the influence of reggaeton drummer Fredy Sobers, and formed a couple of his own bands, NO HAY DIA and 2 Huevos 1 Camino.

After emigrating to rural Illinois in the early 2000's and serving as a social worker while raising two daughters, Villarreal found himself “missing my homeland and curious about exploring some more of my roots,” including the salsa his father had favored back home. A decade later, he moved to Chicago and co-founded Dos Santos, an eclectic quintet calling itself an Anti-Beat Orquesta. “They blend psychedelic rock and some Latin American cumbia fused with chicha,” Villarreal explains. “It’s electric rock, more heavy on guitars, and some lyrics.”

Dos Santos remains Villarreal’s longest stint, with a new album forthcoming. But over the past decade, “after being a side man and a hired gun,” he’s made new connections and recordings in Chicago and LA under his own name. “I play more instrumental stuff, driven by jazz and funk and R&B,” he says. “As a percussionist, you have the power to open up the route to psychedelia, through different layers of rhythms, having congas together with drums, guitars, and organ, a wall of sound, you know? It takes people on a journey, sonically and spiritually.” His debut album, Panamá 77, has been repressed for a limited-edition release, and his second, Lados B, will be reprinted this fall.

His most recent relocation, to Philadelphia, has netted Villarreal new collaborators, one of them quite old. Through former San Franciscan Charlie Hall, he met guitarist DM Hotep, who in turn introduced him to Hotep’s leader in the Sun Ra Arkestra, Marshall Allen. Now, gigging with Allen” is blowing my mind,” says Villarreal. “He’s 102, and he plays like he’s 30 years old.”

A younger thrill awaits Villarreal on the stage of the Joe Henderson Lab. “It’s going to be drums, vibraphone, oboe, bass, and my two daughters as guests on violin.” Estelle and Fania Villarreal, 23 and 21 (and the latter named for the legendary salsa record label), live in San Francisco and grew up gigging with their father, who maintains that, “I don’t consider myself a Latin purist. I’ll be using my bebop four-piece drum set, and I’m a big fan of Max Roach, Roy Haynes, and Tony Williams, I’m showing my style of playing, but you will hear for sure some jazz in my playing.”

Sun Ra’s influence also abides with Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber (BSAC), promoted as “carmelizing the Summer of Love” on July 30th & 31st and August 1st, in the Joe Henderson Lab. Founded in 1999 by the late guitarist and Village Voice music journalist Greg Tate, this group borrowed both part of the name of Sun Ra’s ensemble and the practice of conduction, with performances cued by a code of bodily signals from one of the players, with improvisational, inimitable results.

“Greg wanted to to see how it would work with a band that was fluent in Art Ensemble of Chicago, Parliament-Funkadelic, and The McCoys,” recounts Jared Michael Nickerson, bass player and the current leader and longest-lived member of BSAC, whose size and configuration has morphed over time. The original BSAC was “a very eclectic group of people,” including jazz keyboardist Vijay Iyer. “I wasn’t a jazz player, I was an R&B player, born in ‘53 in Dayton, Ohio, where we had heavy southern leanings. So there were people like the Ohio Players and Roger Troutman and Zapp, and a lot of gospel, secular black music involved in all that funk.”

At the University of Notre Dame, Nickerson, along with several future members of the Chicago band horn section, were introduced to jazz under the direction of Father Wiskerchen. After further education at the New England Conservatory and work in funk bands, Nickerson moved to NYC and became a staple at CBGB, backing an impressive array of artists including Wadada Leo Smith, Jeff Buckley, Bernie Worell, and Charlie Musselwhite.

Nickerson has deployed his Notre Dame major in business management as the CEO of BSAC, where all members are independent contractors. He has also fortified the band’s reputation for reimagining compositions of other artists, both jazz and rock. For this summer’s stop at SFJAZZ, “we can only bring nine members on tour. And what you’re going to see this time is three different shows. There’ll be some brand new conductions, seen only by the audience at each show. Then we’re going to reimagine various hits from 1967. (I was 14 years old then, and it meant witnessing a certain openness of young people, and the spearheading of that commingling was the music.) For the third part of the show, we’re going to bring up our concept of the Burnt Sugar Smokehouse,” a spotlighting of individual players and units which will also be heard on a new album later this year.

“Burnt Sugar is all about possibilities,” Nickerson affirms. “We’re a company of high-flyers who are comfortable walking the tightrope of the unknown.”

To know more about your musical possibilities this summer, check out the SFJAZZ calendar.

Summer Sessions 2026 runs 6/11-8/29. Tickets and more information are available here. 

As an award-winning veteran entertainment journalist and author, Jeff Kaliss has written for regional, national, international, and online publications about jazz, rock, blues, classical, and world music. He’s also a published poet, based in San Francisco, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.