When you’re rambling down memory lane, it’s good to be accompanied by old friends who knew you when.
Pianist Michael Wolff, who spent his formative musical years in Berkeley before hitting the road with jazz stars such as Cal Tjader, Cannonball Adderley, and Nancy Wilson, has been thinking a lot about his past, ever since surviving a harrowing medical crisis that left him bedridden for months.
Between the prolonged recovery and the pandemic, he had plenty of time to work on his insistently readable 2022 autobiography “On That Note: A Memoir of Jazz, Tics and Survival,” which vividly captures how a passion for music provided salvation for a precociously gifted pianist with undiagnosed Tourette’s Syndrome.
In a case of music mimicking memory, his upcoming album “Memoir” explores similar terrain, “though music isn’t linear and there aren’t lyrics,” said Wolff, 71, who plays a series of gigs around the region in the coming days.
“Actually, writing ‘On That Note’ was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Things would start coming to me and I’d start being in that moment, playing with Cannonball or hanging with Bill Evans.”
He’ll be focusing on the “Memoir” music when he plays Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center Thursday, July 25 with an all-star Bay Area band featuring drummer Akira Tana, bassist Essiet Essiet, and guitarist Ray Obiedo. The same quartet performs four shows at Keys Jazz Bistro in North Beach Friday-Saturday, July 26-27, and Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society Sunday afternoon, July 28.
After he spent his early childhood in New Orleans, the 9-year-old Wolff moved with his family to Berkeley in 1961 and by the end of high school he and Richmond-raised Obiedo were hanging out. They’ve collaborated over the years, with Wolff playing in Obiedo’s Latin jazz band and Obiedo accompanying Wolff on his gigs, a situation that showcases the guitarist’s consummate musicality.
“I don’t have parts for Ray,” Wolff says. “He knows how to find the right stuff to play. He can be like a percussionist, or a beautiful chordal person. I love that my music takes him to a different place than he usually goes.”
He’s known Essiet, who also performs with piano great George Cables July 30 at the Stanford Jazz Festival, since the 1990s. The friendship turned into a deep bandstand connection in the mid-aughts when Wolff was co-leading a quartet with Mike Clark, the jazz drummer who became a funk legend with Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters.
Wolff knew Essiet’s formidable reputation as the last bassist to propel Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, but working regularly with him left the pianist, “blown away. He can play anything,” Wolff says. “He’s soulful, and he’s got a beat. My harmonic concept is not regular, ‘cause I’m self-taught. I need somebody who can really lay it down.”
An accompanist who toured and recorded with numerous jazz luminaries before earning renown as a bandleader in his own right, Tana has been Wolff’s go-to drummer for Bay Area trio gigs from SFJAZZ to Piedmont Piano Company.
With a repertoire that ranges far beyond jazz’s fundamental pulse, “The drummer can’t be somebody who’s just straight ahead, and Akira is a really creative musician,” Wolff says.
“Memoir” features compositions spanning half a century. Wolff joined Tjader at 19 in 1972 and the vibraphonist quickly recorded several of his tunes. The album includes pieces he wrote in the 1970s as well as ambitious works for piano and string quartet he wrote during the downtime of recovery and COVID, “because I was writing, writing during months in bed,” he recalled. “I’d just sit at the piano and improvise.”
Searching his memory to capture key scenes for “On That Note” he tapped into the music that shaped his childhood, when he father played Count Basie, Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra on the family hi-fi. He writes most passionately about his early creative connections, but he also covers his show biz years.
Since serving as music director for “The Arsenio Hall Show” from 1989-94 the pianist has been in the thick of the entertainment industry as a player, film composer and eventually an actor. He played father to his actual sons Nat and Alex Wolff on the Nickelodeon mockumentary series “The Naked Brothers Band,” which was created by his wife, writer, producer, director and actress Polly Draper (best known for her leading role in the 1980s ABC drama “Thirtysomething”).
It turns out that working on “Memoir” and his memoirs has fueled a new bout of experimentation for Wolff. “I’ve been looking back at my life and still going forward,” he said. “At the piano, I’m still in the moment.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
MICHAEL WOLFF QUARTET
With Ray Obiedo
7 p.m. Thursday July 25 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $18.50-$36.75; www.kuumbwajazz.org
7 & 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday July 26-27 at Keys Jazz Bistro, San Francisco; $35; keysjazzbistro.com
4:30 p.m. Sunday July 28 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $35-$45 (livestream $10); bachddsoc.org
