Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber

Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber arrives at SFJAZZ for a three-night residency that promises to blur every boundary between funk, space jazz, rock, soul, and avant-garde experimentation. This sprawling improvisational ensemble — founded by the late Village Voice writer Greg Tate and co-led by bassist Jared Michael Nickerson — brings their "barely containable" energy to a program that "caramelizes" the psychedelic music of the 1960s.

Rolling Stone captured their essence perfectly: "A multiracial jam army that freestyles with cool telekinesis between the lustrous menace of Miles Davis' On The Corner, the slash-and-om of 1970s King Crimson, and Jimi Hendrix' moonwalk across side three of Electric Ladyland." This is music that defies categories, freely moving among styles and eras to create its own exciting hybrids.

The secret weapon is Butch Morris's "conduction" system — a vocabulary of hand gestures, eye contact, and physical cues that allows conductor and musicians to improvise with stop-on-a-dime cohesion. The result is a band that performs "like a single, multi-phonic organism," creating what sounds like composed music but is actually born in real time.

For this SFJAZZ edition, the nine-piece lineup features vocalist Shelley Nicole, whose commanding presence cuts through the electric pulse with soul-soaked delivery and occasional sermonic declarations like "The world's going crazy, the least you can do is dance!" She's joined by vocalists Bruce Mack and Miss Olithea, trumpeter JS Williams, multi-instrumentalist V. Jeffery Smith on saxophones and guitar, guitarist Ben Tyree, and keyboardist Leon Gruenbaum with his talk box and "samchillian." Drummer Chris Eddleton provides the electronic-enhanced rhythmic foundation alongside Nickerson's "bubble" bass.

Burnt Sugar's live performances honor the post-modern masters — Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Art Ensemble of Chicago — while remaining utterly contemporary. Recent reviews describe their shows as "glorious balance" between "groove and chaos," with tracks that might start as "sly, greasy funk wiggle" before dropping into "12-minute cosmic sprawl." They've been known to reimagine standards like "Black Cow" as "psychedelic funk stew" and turn Gershwin into "funk-jazz swagger."

With 22 releases on their AVANT GROIDD Musica label and alumni including Vijay Iyer, Vernon Reid, and members of The Roots, this is a collective that embodies Tate's vision: "One foot in the prehistoric, the other in the post human." Their motto says it all: "Never Smooth Jass – Just Hella Bumpy."