Jazz fans, or really anybody who loves great music, ought to check out trumpet great Chris Botti, now in the middle of his 11-show annual residency at SFJazz in San Francisco.
As usual, Botti and his awesome collaborators put on a show of great variety. There’s something for everybody, from dreamy soundtrack excerpts to bebop to standards to contemporary pop.
Botti, affable as ever, introducing each tune with a story, sure knows how to please a crowd. And it helps that he shares the stage with an assemblage of musicians as enthusiastic, inspired, show-bizzy and skilled as he is.
The players kicked off their local gig, part of a series of, as Botti mentioned, “82 shows in 52 nights,” on Monday with a leisurely, one-performance evening.
Botti’s lush, rich horn prevailed throughout, and pretty much every number was a highlight, from “Gabriel’s Oboe,” the main theme of “The Mission” soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, featuring not an oboe, but Anastasiia Mazurok on violin.
Pianist Julian Pollack, bassist Daniel Chmielinski and drummer Lee Pearson made the most of their solos, particularly in Miles Davis covers “Someday My Prince Will Come” and the riotous “Footprints” in which Pearson’s amazing antics at times resembled a circus act.
Guitarist Mark Whitfield and Botti duetted in a terrific version of Leonard Cohen’s ubiquitous “Hallelujah” (better than the original) and saxophonist Chris Potter truly stunned on “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” (Potter appears with Botti through Friday. On Saturday, he joins the Edward Simon Trio and the Del Sol String Quartet at San Francisco’s Presidio Theatre.)
Vocalist John Splithoff soloed in gorgeous renditions of “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and “A Song for You,” matched by Sy Smith, who sang “You’ll Never Know” (following Botti’s fun introduction with a cute Barbra Streisand anecdote; he accompanied her on her 2012 tour) and “The Look of Love.”
Smartly spanning decades to the 21st century, Botti and company closed the concert perfectly, with 2025’s Lady Gaga-Bruno Mars blockbuster “Die With A Smile.” Botti, who knows these things, called it “timeless.”
Chris Botti appears at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 8-9; 3 and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 10; and 3 and 7 p.m. Jan. 11 at SFJazz, 201 Franklin St., San Francisco. Tickets are $64.50 to $194.50 at sfjazz.org.
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