Over the past quarter century Jamie Baum has been in expansion mode, steadily adding new sounds, influences and players to her musical universe.
Building on her long-running septet, the New York City flutist and composer started setting poetry to music. Adding vocalists to her orchestral jazz ensemble, her breathtakingly beautiful 2024 album “What Times Are These” earned a superlative five-star rating from Downbeat Magazine. But for Baum’s rare return to the Bay Area this week, a four-concert run centering on her SFJAZZ Center debut Friday, she’s traveling light.
Baum traces her penchant for instrumental addition back to her work as a graduate student in composition at Manhattan School of Music at the turn of the century, when her ensembles “kept getting bigger,” she said. “Like in ‘The Godfather,’ I keep trying to get out and they pull me back in. I’ve been blessed to play with great players who can go with every crazy idea I throw at them.”
While deeply inspired by her bandmates, Baum found that she was soloing less and less as the group got larger and the music became more complex. Combined with the steep financial challenges of touring and performing with seven or eight other musicians, “I started back in the direction of working with something smaller,” she said.
Thus Baum’s Bay Area tour presents a new quartet featuring Argentine pianist Leo Genovese, drummer Rob Garcia, and bassist Matt Penman, best known to Bay Area audiences as a member of the SFJAZZ Collective from 2005-17. With concerts Jan. 23 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Jan. 24 at SFJAZZ’s Joe Henderson Lab, and Jan. 26 at Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society in Half Moon Bay, the group is focusing on a repertoire of original pieces designed for improvisational exploration.
Baum traces her gradual move toward a looser, less arrangement-oriented body of work to a 2016 duo tour in Europe with the great pianist and composer Richie Beirach, “a friend and mentor who said, ‘This is your assignment. I want you to write blowing-type tunes that fit on one page,’” she recalled.
The project with Beirach evolved into Baum’s Short Stories band, and she came to think of the new pieces as, well, short stories, composed “with the goal of keeping the written music brief and designed to inspire improvisation,” she said. Featuring a core of pianist Andy Milne, chromatic harmonica maestro Grégoire Maret and Baum’s husband, drummer Jeff Hirshfield, the group was set to tour and record in June, 2020.
The slimmed-down concept didn’t return to the front burner until about a year ago. Baum has played with all of the musicians she’s bringing to the West Coast, but this particular quartet configuration is a new situation.
A consummate bassist always in demand, Penman has played in Baum’s septet intermittently over the years. Garcia is also a top New York sideman and bandleader in his own right who recently released “Natural Bounce,” a quartet album featuring Genovese. He’s a player so solidly booked that getting the pianist on the tour was like hitting the jackpot, Baum said.
“I’ve tried to get Leo numerous times over the years, but he’s incredibly busy working with Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter and Leni Stern. We end up on things together in other people’s groups and I’ve felt like we have a great connection. I love his spirit. I’m super excited he’s available.”
What’s not surprising is that these sought-after accomplices are eager to enlist with Baum. “She’s a very interesting composer who writes strong and evocative melodies and interesting harmonies,” Garcia said. “I’ve always been a fan of her larger ensemble stuff. You can feel it when you’re playing with people who are open, with big ears and ready to go in whatever direction the music takes us.”
Switching between C flute, which she often augments with an octave pedal, and the heftier alto flute, Baum has played an essential role in bringing the instrument from jazz’s margins to the center. After decades dominated by one or two stars –Herbie Mann in the 1960s, Hubert Laws and Bobbi Humphrey in the ‘70s, and James Newton in the ‘80s — the flute has fully flowered in jazz since the ‘90s, led by Baum, Nicole Mitchell, Ali Ryerson and most recently Berkeley-reared Elena Pinderhughes.
For Baum, showcasing the skills of collaborators is part of the point of being a bandleader. Asking if the other musicians want to contribute a tune to the quartet’s book isn’t just savvy aesthetically, “giving the band different colors,” she said. “It means they have more invested in the group.”
Whether she’s going big or small, Baum delivers a full-spectrum musically experience.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
JAMIE BAUM QUARTET
When & where: 7 p.m. Jan. 23 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $42; www.kuumbwajazz.org; 7 and 8:30 p.m. Jan. 24 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $25; www.sfjazz.org; 4:30 p.m. Jan. 26 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $40 (livestream $10); bachddsoc.org