Attempting to capture the dizzying, mutable and ever volatile reality of California is not a task for the faint of heart, but no one's ever accused Todd Sickafoose of lacking fortitude. As a bassist, improviser and bandleader, he's a dependably intrepid artist, whether he's playing muscular lines with Ani DiFranco, blithely ignoring stylistic conventions with Andrew Bird, or laying down slinky grooves with Tiny Resistors, his primary vehicle as composer.
On Friday Sickafoose premieres his Chamber Music America–commissioned piece Bear Proof at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage, an hour-long work for an expanded, talent-laden version of his band. Featuring guitarist Adam Levy, violinist Jenny Scheinman, pianist Erik Deutsch, drummer Allison Miller, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and accordionist Rob Reich, it's a conspicuously bi-coastal ensemble though most of the players share intimate Golden State ties. (Sickafoose previews the music Thursday at 10pm on Derk Richardson's KPFA show The Hear and Now).
The Danville-raised bassist first gained attention on the Bay Area scene during the 1990's Internet bubble as an invaluable collaborator with artists like Scheinman, drummer Scott Amendola, singer/songwriter Noe Venable, and Bear Proof reflects his abiding fascination with the way that California has been shaped and reshaped by a series of radical booms and busts. He's not interested in writing programmatic themes so much as evoking California's epochal shifts dating back to the Gold Rush, through sly changes of meter and unexpected transitions.
"I think the cool thing about instrumental music is that you can write about things you can't describe in other ways," Sickafoose says from his home in Oakland. "Crazy things happen everywhere, but this was a pretty spectacular thing that happened in San Francisco, the rush of people who came and made this place. There's a feeling that informs what this place is, and it's a big reason why it's different than the East Coast."
It would take an eight-dimensional Venn diagram to capture the manifold interlocking musical relationships that bind Tiny Resistors together. For starters, Sickafoose anchors Scheinman's powerhouse quartet Mischief & Mayhem with Wilco guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Jim Black. He's the sparkplug of Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom, and produced the formidable quartet's latest album No Morphine No Lilies. And he anchors the Rob Reich Trio, a more recent musical development.