By Dave Roberts

The following are by no means all of the shows coming to the Bay Area in March and early April. They are just some of the ones that jump out at me as noteworthy or that might be overlooked.

Yoshi’s
March

• 7-11 – Organist Jimmy Smith. You gotta catch the legends when you can.
• 12 – CARMA. If you want to catch many of the Bay Area’s top jazz musicians on stage at the same time, check out this cutting-edge big band. Led by Michael Zilber, a dynamic tenor and soprano saxophonist, the band features Steve Smith on drums, Andre Bush on guitar, Bevan Manson on piano and Peter Barshay on bass – all of them excellent. The first set will be a live recording of original compositions, while the second will feature vocalist Kitty Margolis along with music from Dan Buegeleisen’s CD West Coast Alternative.
• 13-18 – Pharaoh Sanders. A legend of the saxophone.
• 22-25 – David Benoit. One of the better contemporary artists, especially the Vince Guaraldi tribute, Here’s to You, Charlie Brown (GRP).
• 26-28 – Flugelhornist Dmitri Matheny makes his annual return to celebrate a new CD, perform with a string quartet, and back up vocalist Mary Stallings on consecutive nights.

April

• 5-8 – George Shearing Trio. One of the greatest jazz pianists of all time; should not be missed by anyone who loves jazz piano trios.

May

• 9-13 – Chick Corea New Trio. Chick put on a great show at Yoshi’s last year with Origin and has recently released two excellent solo albums. When anyone discusses legendary jazz pianists of the past 40 years, several – so famous that they need only one name – immediately come to mind: McCoy, Herbie, and Chick. The other two-name pianists would probably be Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. Fortunately, four of these five greats are still performing. I know I’m leaving out hundreds of excellent pianists, but most people would probably agree that these are the Big 5 of the past 40 years.

SF Performances
March
10 – Fred Hersch, Herbst Theatre. An excellent pianist in a program titled “Songs Without Words,” music by Hersch, Cole Porter, Thelonious Monk and others.

SFJAZZ
March
31 (and April 1) – Avishai Cohen, Yerba Buena Center. Cohen’s bass playing was one of the highlights of the Chick Corea show at Yoshi’s last year.

April
1 – Joshua Redman, the SFJAZZ artistic director and a fine saxophonist, unveils a song cycle called “Passage of Time.”

Great American Music Hall
March
14 – Danilo Perez, an excellent pianist who is combining jazz with world music.

Bruno’s
March
29-31 – Sam Rivers, a pianist and reed player who is one of the legends of the avant-garde. I remember catching him in the late-‘70s with bassist Dave Holland in a small upper loft at DC Space in Washington D.C. It was free-form in a way that seemed quite daring at the time. But – unlike a lot of the self-indulgent squawking, bleating and blatting that was done in the name of free expression at that time – their playing then would probably stand up well today.

Jazz at Pearl’s
March
23-24 – Vocalist Ernestine Anderson with the Vince Lateano Trio.

Dave Roberts has been a professional writer for more than a decade in newspapers, magazines and high-tech. He's a student of jazz piano, and writing a book, Tips From the Jazz Piano Pros, consisting of interviews with jazz pianists that focus on the art and craft of playing jazz piano.

If you are a professional jazz pianist or know of one who would be interested in participating, e-mail him at DaveRobertsJazz@cs.com. Also, if you are a Bay Area (or northern California) jazz musician, let him know what you're up to: CDs, shows, Web sites, etc.