After decades of decline, the city of Detroit has been reclaiming its former glory in recent years, a resurgence with a soundtrack all its own.
Motown’s spectacular musical legacy, dating back long before Berry Gordy’s “sound of young America” turned the Motor City’s nickname into an international brand, is rooted in jazz, but encompasses pop, rock, R&B, funk, and hip hop.
Famed bassist, producer, composer and band leader Don Was, co-founder of the Detroit funk rock band Was (Not Was) and president of the storied jazz label Blue Note Records since 2011, is doing his part to keep the movement rolling.
He introduces his Pan-Detroit Ensemble at the SFJAZZ Center Sept. 26-27 before heading down the road to the Monterey Jazz Festival, where the talent-packed combo closes down the Garden Stage Saturday night.
He’s been touting the music of his hometown for years — Was performed widely with his Detroit All-Star Revue in 2018 — but these days he’s got the wind at his back, powered by scholarship like music journalist Mark Stryker’s essential 2019 book “Jazz From Detroit.”
“I’ve had conversations over the last three weeks with three different entities trying to make movies about Detroit music,” Was said. “There’s definitely something in the zeitgeist. It’s just unparalleled the amount of great music that’s come out of this town.”
Drawing on the city’s deep pool of talent, the Pan-Detroit Ensemble weaves the kindred musical idioms together in high-octane presentation inspired by Detroit-linked icons such as bluesman John Lee Hooker, hard-bop trumpeter Donald Byrd, funk legend George Clinton, radical rocker Mitch Ryder, and proto-punks The Stooges. The band is directly linked to Eminem via Puerto Rican keyboardist Luis Resto, who’s been a key collaborator for the Detroit-reared rap superstar since the chart-topping 2002 album “The Eminem Show.”
“I hired him for his first session as a teenager with Was (Not Was),” Was said. “He’s probably the biggest producer in America, working with Eminem, Post Malone, Jay-Z. But this group isn’t a producer’s project. It’s pretty ad hoc and relaxed.”
The three-piece horn section includes tenor saxophonist Dave McMurray, who’s released two Blue Note albums interpreting the songs of the Grateful Dead through a jazz lens. It’s not a coincidence that Was has been captured by the Dead’s gravitational pull as a founding and touring member of Bob Weir and the Wolf Bros.
The band’s secret weapon (well, secret until she opens her mouth) is vocalist Steffanie Christi’an, a Detroit powerhouse steeped in Motor City sounds since birth. A hard-rocking singer versed in an array of African American musical idioms, “she’s led a super interesting life, and that’s reflected in her singing,” Was said. “She’s got a wealth of experience and I find it impossible to classify her genre wise. That’s the supreme compliment.”
He credits SFJAZZ Artistic Director Terence Blanchard with providing the push to assemble the Pan-Detroit Ensemble when the trumpeter/composer programmed Was as part of a series presented by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The invitation came with two years lead time but six months before the concert this past May, “I still don’t have a band,” Was said.
Thinking as a producer and label honcho, he leaned into what sets him apart as an artist, thinking that “the thing that makes you different is your superpower,” he said.
“You have to play to your strengths and there’s something I can do that Robert Glasper and Jason Moran can’t. Those guys are great musicians, but they didn’t have Funkadelic and the Stooges playing at their high school. I’m a Detroit guy, I figure just go home and be yourself and surround yourself with like-minded people.”
With his singular status as an executive, producer and player Was has landed a series of plum gigs. But he’s also tuning into a zeitgeist with a repertoire that covers a lot of ground.
“They cross a lot of musical territory with a juicy repertoire,” said Darin Atwater, the polymathic pianist, composer, conductor who booked the Pan-Detroit Ensemble for his first year as artistic director of the Monterey Jazz Festival. (He’s only the third person to hold the job in 67 seasons.)
“To know Don as the Blue Note guy and see him doing his own band with its own defined sound is really something. That said, it’s not easy to put your hands on where to place it. In a live setting there’s so much flexibility, and I love how that band grabs onto a groove when it comes together.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
DON WAS
With the Pan-Detroit Ensemble
At SFJAZZ: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26-27; SFJAZZ Miner Auditorium, San Francisco; $35-$115 (Sept. 27 livestream $7); www.sfjazz.org
At Monterey Jazz Festival: 9:30 p.m. Sept. 28; Monterey Jazz Festival Garden Stage; $88; festival runs Sept. 27-29 at Monterey County Fairgrounds; montereyjazzfestival.org