The musical ministry of Samora Pinderhughes grew out of the progressive soul of Berkeley.
Pianist, composer, vocalist and anti-incarceration activist Pinderhughes has thrived since moving to New York City in 2009 to study jazz piano at Juilliard. But rather than hewing to a straight-ahead jazz path, he embarked on a wending journey that has taken him from the dungeons of America’s death row to the heights of American culture as he’s reconfigured conversations about crime, punishment, forgiveness and healing.
Returning to Berkeley for his first hometown concert since 2018, Pinderhughes plays Cornerstone on Thursday, Dec. 12, focusing on material from his revelatory new album, Venus Smiles Not In The House of Tears. While the album is a subtly orchestrated song cycle laced together with a gentle lattice of keyboards, lapidary electric guitar lines, string quartet and winds (including his younger sister, Elena Pinderhughes, on flute), he’s opening up the songs, both expanding and distilling them with the quartet he’s bringing to the West Coast.
“The album itself is sequenced like a story, beginning to end,” Pinderhughes said on a recent phone call. “As a person who loves albums and comes from the album era, it’s definitely conceived as an entire work, like a film. But the live performance is a totally separate thing. We don’t perform in sequence. We take different pieces and open them up. Instead of trying to tell the same story, we’re using certain pieces to open up the emotions that are in that song.”
In many ways, it’s the next step on the multifaceted journey represented by his 2022 album, Grief, the most portable component of The Healing Project (which received a million dollar grant last year from the Mellon Foundation). A vast and sprawling endeavor based on about 100 interviews focusing on people of color who’ve had life-changing encounters with the criminal justice system, this creative archipelago expanded from a 2022 installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts into an online archive and interactive forum.
Pinderhughes is still deeply engaged in social transformation. But Venus is a project that looks inward, exploring knotty emotions and internal conflict. Featuring Elliott Skinner on vocals and guitar, bassist Joshua Crumbly and drummer Conor Rayne, the highly versatile ensemble has plunged into the material to reimagine it, planing away the sumptuous textures to expose the sturdy architecture of the songs. “They’re all incredible musicians,” Pinderhughes said.
He met Crumbly at Juilliard, where the prodigious bassist was recruited by trumpet great Terence Blanchard (who featured one of Crumbly’s tunes on his acclaimed 2013 album, Magnetic). He’s become a commanding force, anchoring projects by an array of jazz artists, including saxophonist Kamasi Washington, soul/jazz vocalist Lizz Wright, vibraphonist Stefon Harris and guitarist Anthony Wilson, as well as soul singer-songwriter Leon Bridges.
Describing Crumbly as “my right hand since college,” Pinderhughes said he’s come to depend on the unbreakable tensile strength and melodic intensity of the bassist’s lines. “He’s become a key part of the sound of the music,” he noted.
Skinner is a prolific singer/songwriter in his own right who came into Pinderhughes’ orbit about a decade ago via the Healing Project Choir. Rayne, however, is a recent addition to the Pinderhughes constellation. They met through Venus guitarist Gabe Schneider, who’s part of the Los Angeles duo The Trash Pals with Rayne. On a tour last spring opening for
French-Caribbean funk singer/songwriter Adi Oasis, Pinderhughes started honing and distilling the material with Crumbly and Rayne.
“The music from the new album is heavy on production, and the sonics go in a lot of directions,” he said. “But the musical material is a vessel for investigation. Another thing I’m excited about is that the artists are going to do their own opening mini-sets, creating this tapestry of what it feels like to create and perform together. They all have their own groups, and they give themselves to the music. It’s a community thing, where people come in from different collaborative experiences.”
Embracing a plethora of voices is something of a birthright. Raised in an activist academic Berkeley family, Pinderhughes absorbed an expansive world view from both his mother, San Francisco State professor Raquel Rivera-Pinderhughes, an expert on green jobs, green jobs training and environmental literacy, and his father, Howard Pinderhughes, professor and chair of the department of social and behavioral sciences at UC San Francisco.
His parents immersed him in the deep and overlapping cultural and progressive currents running through Berkeley in the 1990s and aughts, activities and training that flowed through him to his sister, starting with Venezuelan percussion and then piano.
“Our parents would take us to a lot of shows,” said flutist/vocalist Elena Pinderhughes, who’s spent recent years on the road with Common, Herbie Hancock and Grammy Award-winning New Orleans trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (aka Christian Scott). “When musicians saw we were really interested, they took us under their wing. At La Peña Cultural Center, “my brother studied with John Santos and Jackeline Rago, the Venezuelan cuatro master and percussionist, and she worked with flutist Donna Viscuso. I saw the flute, pointed to it and said, ‘I want to play that one!’”
They both describe their years in the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra (then known as the Young Musicians Program) as formative. A conservatory program for low-income, underprivileged students, “it was like a home for young artists,” Samora Pinderhughes said. “That’s where my sister and I got into jazz, and it’s the reason why we’re both vocalists. I met Patrice Rushen, Frank Foster and so many legendary people.”
Far more than acquiring a set of skills, he came to understand that the rhythms and song forms told stories of dislocation and diaspora, resistance and resilience, spiritual sustenance and earthly succor. Those historical arcs continue to undergird his music, whatever the context.
Recently, his attention has turned toward film, creating scores with Chris Pattishall for projects like Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and The Strike, a remarkable new documentary about the prison hunger strike that ended the pervasive and extended use of solitary confinement in California.
“What I love about film scoring is that it focuses your set of options around the story,” he said. “I really like that I’m not thinking of the technical aspects of music. It’s about what emotion is this scene trying to tell me. Actually, in my own music, I’m still thinking like film, about what does this character want to do. I find them to be very connected.”
In the world of Samora Pinderhughes, everything is connected, and those relationships start in Berkeley.
