Howard Wiley: Tales of a Stone Cold, Straight Ahead, Swing Demon

“Every time I get to a gig, especially at SFJAZZ, I’m like, this is not going to be a boring jazz show,” proclaims saxophonist Howard Wiley.

I have faith he can deliver, because I’ve seen and heard how Wiley brightens up a room ever since he was a teen joining jams in the dim lighting of the basement at Pearl Wong’s restaurant in Chinatown. And Wiley, now 46, has consciously followed in the footsteps of those who’ve founded the joy in jazz for more than a century. “I think I’m one of the last in the line of those that got the old school thing,” he says. “Anytime you saw the OG’s, it was a fun show. I remember going to see James Moody and the Cedar Walton Trio at Yoshi’s, where Billy Higgins would bust out into a hip hop beat and Moody would start rapping.”

Wiley’s own wide embrace of genres has positioned him as a busy go-to player, teacher, arranger, producer, and musical director all over the Bay Area and on tour nationally and abroad. He’s finishing up two years as a Resident Artistic Director at SFJAZZ with a danceable show in the Miner Auditorium on May 24th, dubbed Love, Kale, Pride & Revolution. “It’s just a tribute to my home, all the stuff the Bay Area is doing,” he says. “We’ve had the best love and the best revolution. And have you ever been to New York and ordered a kale salad? Oh my god, it’s f__king terrible, man!” In keeping with his homegrown musical pride, Wiley and his ten-piece ‘project’ will be serving up some tasty mashups. “The favorite one I’ve been working on has Duke Ellington with the Jefferson Airplane and Digital Underground. And another one is ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ with ‘I Got 5 On It’. I got to hear all that around the same time, when I was in high school, Tony Bennett and this hardcore hip hop band from Oakland.”

Even earlier in his life, Oakland churches got Wiley connected with music and his family’s roots in the South. He grew up with grandparents in the house, and after he took up his grandfather Sam Wiley’s instrument — the saxophone — he was invited to play for the congregation when he wasn’t singing in the children’s choir. His grandmother taught him piano, and after being introduced to recordings of the jazz canon at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, “I went from listening to whatever R&B and hip hop was on the radio to nothing but Duke and Bird and Miles and Trane.”

Wiley played his first Yoshi’s gig at age 14 and was invited to workshop with Ed Kelly and to join Dee Spencer’s GRAMMY Band at San Francisco State University. To journalists, Wiley reverently describes his hands-on education in the presence of Bay Area jazz veterans as “getting my ass kicked”. The benign kicking came with the company of trumpeter and organist John Turk at Glide Church and saxophonist Jules Broussard in Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, where Wiley also shared rehearsal, performance, and travel time with such valuable mentors as Allen Smith and Bill Stewart.

“These OGs would tell me, ‘You got to play for your supper, you need a place to stay tonight. So you’ve got to touch somebody, you’re got to make them feel something.’ They played, and they got dinner, breakfast, a place to stay, and some wonderful companionship from communicating, from making people feel. I got the real s__t from them, and I’m just so happy to be a representative of it.”

A chance occurrence at a jazz festival in Southern California had Wiley sitting down at a drum set and liking it. “I realized it was a way to better understand time and the feel of keeping it,” he says. He stuck with the practice, and the drums have remained a second source of performance income.

Ever musically curious and adaptable, Wiley stayed locally busy, including a four-year stint at the Madrone Art Bar in SF with his Extra Nappy band. “It was just a dance gig, playing songs off the radio,” but it widened his repertoire and pleased his Karly, whom he married in 2010. “She loves any pop and R&B stuff from the ‘80s on, and when I’m listening to modern jazz, she’d be like, ‘Are you done?’. But then I’ll catch her singing [John Coltrane’s] ‘Mr. P.C.’”

Word of mouth and a trickle of albums in the first years of the new millennium (including 2002's Twenty First Century Negro and 2007's The Angola Project, inspired by field recordings at the titular Louisiana prison) began getting Wiley festival bookings outside the Bay Area and collaborations with the likes of Lauren Hill and Jason Moran (a fellow alumnus of the GRAMMY Band). Wiley’s experience away from home, while vital to his career, served to strengthen his sense of rightness about both the sound of music and where it should be made. He found New York stuck on a mode of modern jazz which was “taking us too far, it’s like so heady, so unemotional. It’s no blues, no swing, no singable melodies. In New York, you’re not going to catch people with both a high urban sensibility and a country soulfulness thing. And you ain’t going to go to no jazz show where somebody will put the Duke together with some Jefferson Airplane San Francisco Sound and some hip hop. But that’s the Bay Area, where I’m trying to reach back to the people, I’m like, people, just come with me, I got something for you.”

I’m a stone cold, straight ahead, swing demon, you know what I’m saying?

You’d also be hard put to find anywhere else a scene like the Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge in San Francisco’s Mission District. On a couple of Thursdays a month, you can get up close and personal with Wiley and his sax, Chris Siebert on the bar’s built-in Hammond organ, and an affordable scotch-and-soda you can toast them with. Together, the pair blow glory into melody lines from the American Songbook and launch on into mind-bending improvisational explorations. “I don’t get to play a lot of jazz, but when I’m there, we are playing jazz,” Wiley enthuses. “And I get to play with people who might drop in, and do stuff from the church, or from the street. I’m a stone cold, straight ahead, swing demon, you know what I’m saying? This stuff is completely unadulterated, it’s the stuff that really made the music popular, and there’s a reason people are still listening to this.”

At SFJAZZ, Wiley has been showcasing different and original work. “I’m doing my funky stuff, funk with a serious jazz aesthetic. But that’s just a blend of all the black musics that I love.” Joining Wiley and his sax on the Miner stage will be a dazzling array of old and newer acquaintances, some of who’ve figured in previous SFJAZZ projects, including Marcus Phillips on bass. Special guests include vocalists China Moses and Martin Luther McCoy, trumpeter Tatiana Tate, trombonist Kevin Eubanks, guitarist Tim Landers, and pianist and rapper Kev Choice. “I’m happy for the opportunity to present this music at a wonderful venue,” says Wiley. “When you come to my shows at SFJAZZ, you see black people, you see young people, old people, you see people from the Tenderloin and Hunter’s Point, you see people from Glide Church, you see people from Oakland. I’m trying to bring community.”

Wiley might be a poster boy for the power of jazz networking in the Bay Area. On a night when a temporary disability kept Siebert from his post at the Cuckoo, Wiley had Lionel “LJ” Holoman, the organist from his SFJAZZ shows, sub in for a very different kind of collaboration. At Keys Jazz Bistro, Wiley played drums backing Siebert and Lavay Smith’s Reefer Madness revue on April 20th. Earlier in the month, Wiley joined many of his longtime musical colleagues in performance at Yoshi’s, in memory of beloved jazz and blues journalist and teacher Lee Hildebrand.

This July, Wiley plans a celebration of the musically venerated Tenderloin neighborhood at its premium surviving venue, the Great American Music Hall. In collaboration with the Tenderloin Museum, “we’ll talk a little bit, play a little bit. I want to talk with the cats who remember what the Black Hawk [1949-1963] was like. Hyde Street Studios. I’ll try to get John Handy, and Lady Bianca. That neighborhood used to mean so much to the city, but now the Tenderloin gets such a bad rap. But I think it’s a beautiful place.”

Wiley is the perfect host for this sort of thing, comfortably humorous on the bandstand, a contagious carrier of a spirit of shared joy, which he’d like to hear more of. “You listen to live recordings of Freddie Hubbard at Keystone Korner, and he’ll start getting to some groove, and you hear everybody in the background yelling, ‘You see what he’s doing?’. That’s what you’re supposed to do at a jazz show, right? That’s community!”

SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director Howard Wiley performs his program Love, Kale, Pride & Revolution: California Love Series Part II on 5/24. Tickets and more information are available here.

As an award-winning veteran entertainment journalist and author, Jeff Kaliss has written for regional, national, international, and online publications about jazz, rock, blues, classical, and world music. He’s also a published poet, based in San Francisco, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.