Happy Friday, East Bay. Plan the next 72 hours of your life with help from our critics.
Kenny Burrell 80th Birthday Celebration
The legends of jazz may be aging, but they’re still producing some phenomenal music. Take Kenny Burrell, the Detroit-born guitarist who will celebrate his eightieth birthday this week at Yoshi’s, with an all-star band. And, in this case, the term “all-star” is completely warranted. Trombonist Steve Turre, pianist Billy Childs, saxophonists Tivon Pennicott and Steve Wilson, and trumpeter Bobby Rodriguez will round out the proceedings, along with the Intergrand Orchestra, whose members will join Burrell for the late show on Sunday. Of course, the guitarist will be front and center at this elaborate celebration, regaling audiences with his nimble solos and dense, bedrock grooves. His résumé in jazz goes on for days, and includes collaborations with everyone from Wynton Kelly to Jimmy Smith and John Coltrane. He’s one of the last masters you can still hear live, so don’t pass up the opportunity. At Oakland Yoshi’s (510 Embarcadero, Oakland) Thursday through Sunday, July 28-31. $20-$30. Yoshis.com. — Rachel Swan
Bramblur
The latest coinage from JoPro’s forest of neologisms conjoins brambles and blurs; it’s a good title for Katy Stone‘s relief sculptures and Allison Gildersleeve’s paintings, which combine nature with abstraction. Stone, known for her witty floral collages and installations of folded paper and painted Duralar drafting film (seven of which are included here), is showing new laser-cut metal reliefs, generally painted in bright oil enamels, which suggest natural forms and textures like bark and foliage as well as stylized flames and clouds (or Lichtenstein’s Pop stylings of AbEx brushstrokes). Gildersleeve paints her native Northeast’s clapboard houses, stone walls, forests, and thickets using flat patches of heavy paint in the Fairfield Porter manner, but more ambiguously; her spatially flattened abstract landscapes are shaped by memory and process. Bramblur runs through August 18 at Johansson Projects (2300 Telegraph Ave., Oakland). 510-444-9140 or JohanssonProjects.com. — DeWitt Cheng
