Black History and Love Intertwine at These February Bay Area Concerts

I’m hardly the first person to note that setting aside the four weeks of February to celebrate Black history can feel a little backhanded, given that it’s shortest month of the year. But the heart of winter also contains a holiday dedicated to romance, love and eros, and too little has been made of Black History Month’s coupling with Valentine’s Day, particularly given Black music’s essential role as the soundtrack for love in all its many manifestations.

No force in American culture better evokes the jumbled, intermingled emotions, impulses and sensations we stuff into the Hermione’s handbag definition of love, which encompasses everything from carnal longing for a forbidden caress to desperate desire for unity with God. And in much the same way that classical Persian poets like Rumi and Hafez transmute spiritual ardor into the language of earthly passion, soul and R&B can transpose the ecstasy of Sunday morning worship into Saturday night revelry.

The Bay Area is blessed with a multitude of artists who are eloquent in these musical love languages, like the polymathic actor, songwriter, event curator and smoldering soulman Martin Luther McCoy. He’s celebrating Feb. 14 with a tribute to Sade at the SFJAZZ Center, “No Ordinary Love,” a concert in which he’ll be slipping some of his original songs into the mix. (McCoy performs another Sade tribute on March 9 at San Francisco’s Black Cat, followed by a Prince tribute on March 10.)

Growing up in San Francisco, McCoy absorbed a broad sacred-to-secular spectrum of Black music, picking up Parliament from his older brother while “my parents were more into gospel and the church,” he said.

The McCoy household resounded with the artists who pioneered the soul aesthetic, like Dinah Washington, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, whose classic live album Sam Cooke at the Copa “was playing on the car tape deck every time we’d go to church,” he recalled. While Sade’s music eschews gospel’s melismatic drama in favor of lithe, cool-toned lines, McCoy brings extroverted fervor to every musical situation, whether he’s in singer-songwriter mode, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, or belting out Sly Stone anthems with the SFJAZZ Collective. He’s releasing a new album Feb. 14, Welcome Back Love, making his own statement about the enduring power of romantic Black music. And on March

For suave, swoon-inducing old-school R&B, no Bay Area artist has carried the torch with more style than Nicolas Bearde, who performs at North Beach’s Keys Jazz Bistro Feb. 10, Mama Kins in San Jose on Valentine’s Day and Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company Feb. 18. He brings a vast world of experience to the stage, from performances with Linda Tillery’s field-hollers-to-hip-hop Cultural Heritage Choir to Bobby McFerrin’s improvisation-laced a cappella Voicestra and its spin-off SoVoSó.

As a solo artist he earned an avid following crooning sophisticated R&B, but Bearde has evolved in recent years into a captivating jazz singer whose easy-going authority on ballads and mid-tempo swingers distinguished his 2019 album I Remember You: The Music of Nat King Cole. He notes that the marriage of church and nightclub was “somewhat controversial at first.”

“The AME church I went to as a young person in Nashville would never have allowed a drum kit and electric bass,” he said. “That was devil music. The only thing you’d have is piano. Not even a tambourine. But the church a block away, when that band got to thumping sometimes I wished I could have got in there. It sounded like they were having a good time.”

When you’re looking for swaggering blues-drenched authority, Jamie Davis is the cat to call. He’s the headliner Feb. 17 at “Playing In the Key of Life” at  Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts, where the Unity Music Foundation presents a fundraiser for scholarships supporting talented young musicians. A commanding baritone, Davis sings with a big band on a program that also includes performances by multi-instrumentalist Kyle Athayde, vocalist Clairdee and special guest drummer Greg Errico, a founding member of Sly and The Family Stone.

One of the finest male vocalists in jazz, Davis can belt the blues, croon American Songbook ballads with a warm, burnished tone, and deliver Stevie Wonder hits with soulful authority. Born and raised in Ohio, he experienced music’s transporting power at his father’s Pentecostal church, where he first performed in the choir and then came into his own as a soloist. Always interested in a range of styles and idioms, he moved to San Francisco in the mid-1970s and established himself with top players like trumpeter Eddie Henderson and tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.

Davis got his big break when word reached him indirectly that he’d been hired for the Basie Orchestra in 2000. While legendary pianist and bandleader Count Basie died in 1984, the orchestra has continued to build on its storied history as a showcase for great jazz singers, from Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday in the 1930s to San Francisco great Mary Stallings in the 1970s. (The orchestra just won its first Grammy, taking home the best large jazz ensemble album trophy for Basie Swings the Blues.)

Speaking of Clairdee and Mary Stallings, they’re both playing Keys Jazz Bistro next week. A sparking vocalist who infuses even melancholy material with a sense of optimism, Clairdee plays a run of four Valentine’s shows Feb. 14-15. And Stallings, who has established Keys as a premiere venue for vocalists with monthly appearances, returns on Feb. 16-17. The fact that she sounds magnificent at 81 makes it tempting to joke about her deal with the devil, but Stallings found her calling at seven years old at the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Geary Street.

Sitting in the upstairs pews looking down at a gospel choir from Chicago, “something hit me,” she told journalist Rich Scheinin in a 2020 interview. “You can’t separate the music from the religious aspect, the spiritual aspect. This music is a spiritual thing. I was a little girl of seven years old, and I was touched. And when I came home, I told my mother, ‘Mama, I want to be singer. I want to sing! I want to sing!’”