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The Do List

The Gospel According to Howard Wiley

Raised in the church, the Bay Area jazz saxophonist prepares a show direct from Sunday mass.
Gabe Meline

A Black man in a cap and patterned blue shirt stands with a saxophone, with moving boxes and an organ in the background
Pictured in his Oakland studio, saxophonist Howard Wiley has been preparing for an upcoming run of gospel shows, titled ‘Saturday Night to Sunday Morning.’ (Gabe Meline/KQED)

Some people go to church on Sunday morning. Others make it an all-day activity. Growing up, jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley attended two different Oakland churches, and used to ditch services to go to another church.

If you know Wiley, the reason is probably obvious. “It was like a jam session!” he says, sitting in his Oakland studio on a recent afternoon. “They are playing music, they are singin’, they are jammin’. So I’d go down there just to hang out and check out the music.”

The musical bedrock laid by those childhood Sundays is the foundation of Wiley’s upcoming shows at SFJAZZ, a gospel and jazz hybrid that he’s titled Saturday Night to Sunday Morning.

Jazz and God have intersected before — famously through John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; locally in Duke Ellington’s concert to consecrate Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Part gospel standards, part originals, Wiley’s show is less an evocation of a genre — gospel music — and more of a summoning of its spirit.

“There’s something that just make you, that give you chills, that raise a hair on your arm,” says Wiley, one of five resident artistic directors at SFJAZZ this season. “When that Holy Spirit hit, it’s no denying it. And I hear it in everybody’s music. I hear it in Coltrane’s music. I hear it in Cannonball Adderley’s music. I hear it in James Brown’s music. I hear it when I read James Baldwin.”

Those open ears, of the musician-as-receiver, guide Wiley’s omnivorous activity. In the past year, I’ve happened to see him playing raucous Second Line marches with MJ’s BrassBoppers, tender ballads in a duo with longtime collaborator Kev Choice, and angular back-and-forth solos with tenor sax titan David Murray. Every time, the spirit — that goosebumps thing — is present.

Jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley rehearses in his Oakland studio. (Gabe Meline/KQED)

For one song to be performed this week, “That’s Why We Praise His Holy Name,” Wiley put himself in the music after his faith was tested. During his years of playing at Glide Memorial in the Tenderloin, there was a small child that sat in the front row.

“I had found out the baby’s life had been so tried. His mother was incarcerated, his father was incarcerated,” Wiley says. “And I don’t see the baby one week. Next week I see the uncle, I’m like, ‘Hey, man, where’s the baby?’ He’s like, ‘The baby is dead.’ Hurt me to my soul.”

That same day, Wiley learned that another acquaintance — “a man of God, a family man who I respected, I knew his family” — had been convicted of molesting children. While wrestling with the fact that God could allow such things to happen, Wiley started writing.

“It’s like a conversation with God. It’s like ‘God, how can this happen?’ And then talking to the victim, ‘How can this happen?’ And through God’s light, I found a way that saved my mind and soul. That’s ‘That’s Why We Praise His Holy Name.'”

Wiley’s quintet for Saturday Night to Sunday Morning includes Damien Sneed, who collaborated with Wynton Marsalis on his Abyssinian Mass, along with Camille Thurman, Amina Scott and Darrell Green. The set’s traditional spirituals run in their blood; all share a language from the church.

For Wiley, that language came early, from Star Bethel Missionary Baptist Church and Triumph Church on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, both founded after Wiley’s family left the south during the Great Migration — and, down the street, the jam sessions at The Church of God in Christ.

Wiley rattles off the names of church folk who planted something in him: Pastor Claiborne. Mae Mae on piano. Joe Bumpus on organ. Sister Willie Mae, Mother Scott, and Mother Gray and Papa Gray, who encouraged him. Willie B., who hired him for his first gig. All contribute in their own way to this week’s shows, which Wiley hopes will provide a bit of realignment.

“You know, look at all this war. Look at all this famine. Look at all this starvation. Look at our entire world ecosystem, where it’s haves and have-nots. That is not the way of God,” Wiley says.

“But this music, it’s just something that does it. Same with Stevie Wonder’s music, or to hear Bach’s music, Beethoven’s music — it’s just something that is so pure, it takes you out of this construct that we’re in.”

Howard Wiley’s ‘Saturday Night to Sunday Morning’ runs Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 2 and 3, with four shows at SFJAZZ in San Francisco. Details here.

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