Freebie of the week: Ensemble for These Times is more than a group of musicians with a cool moniker: E4TT. The talented Bay Area chamber group opens a window onto an exciting world of contemporary and classical compositions for many casual music fans. The award-winning outfit, founded nearly 20 years ago, includes a soprano, artistic executive director and co-founder Nanette McGuinness; cellist Megan Chartier; pianist Margaret Halbig; and composer, co-founder and senior artistic advisor David Garner, and works with a revolving cast of guest artists. The group has commissioned more than 60 world premieres, and its works explore themes ranging from the Cassandra Complex (the curse of telling the truth but having no one believe you), to outer space, to the 1937 bombing of Guernica and the famed Picasso painting that captured it. This week, E4TT is releasing its sixth album, “El Tiempo Latine,” featuring new arrangements of works by contemporary Latine composers.
To celebrate, E4TT performs a concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Center for New Music, 55 Taylor St., San Francisco. The program includes several composers featured on the album, including Gabriela Lena Frank, Tania León, Carla Lucero, Claudia Montero, Brennan Stokes and José Bragato. The concert is free (donations are welcome), although it’s advisable to RSVP at www.e4tt.org/index.html. You can also catch a livestream on E4TT’s YouTube channel.
Another freebie: Golden Gate Park’s beloved bandshell is hosting a bunch of cool free concerts this summer, including a Friday performance by a band determined to carry on San Francisco’s impressive blues/rock/psychedelia legacy. And we don’t mean they play “Truckin’” five times a week. Wreckless Strangers are more interested in putting out new music, their own new music. Released March 27, the album “Dirty Souls” already has a couple of tracks (“Dirty Soul” and “The Runaround”) on the playlists of a few rock and Americana music charts.
Wreckless Strangers describe their “Ameri-Cali Soul” sound as a fertile mix of great parts of Bay Area music history, inspired by artists from Bonnie Raitt to Boz Scaggs to Lost Planet Airmen to Sly and the Family Stone. The band — featuring lead singer Amber Morris, lead guitarist and singer David Noble, bassist and singer Joshua Zucker, drummer/singer Mick Hellman, guitarist and singer Rob Anderson and keyboard player Fletcher Nielsen —performs at 4:30 p.m. Friday at the Bandshell. More information is at wrecklesssrangers.com.
Cultural heritage at the Bedford: The Nahua people of Mexico, one of the country’s largest indigenous groups, have created a wealth of folk art and storytelling. Take Inocencio Jiménez Chino, for example, who has been creating drawings, painting and other works since he was a teen in the 1960s. Like many Mexican artists in the mid-20th century, Chino got his start when so-called “tourist art” became popular as Mexico began drawing visitors from North America and the rest of the world.
Although he was taught to mimic the commercial and non-confrontational style of the time, Chino couldn’t resist the temptation to pursue his own style and ideas, including line-drawings protesting a proposed dam. His work has since been inspired by his vivid imagination, along with stories and legends reflecting life on the Balsas River basin in Guerrero, where he has lived his whole life. Now the Mexican artist is getting his first solo retrospective in a collection on view at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. Most of the works are colorful paintings rendered on amate, including a series of paintings titled “Uncle Rabbit and the Wax Doll,” something of an allegorical tale of clever critters outsmarting those in power.
“Aztec Stories in Modern Mexico: An Inocencio Jiménez Chino Retrospective” runs at the Bedford, located inside the Lesher Arts Center at Civic Drive and Locust Street, through June 26. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sundays, admission is pay what you can. More information is at www.bedfordgallery.org/home.
A preeminent presence: The venerable Herbert Blomstedt, conductor and music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1985-1995, is in his 98th year and still active as conductor laureate of the orchestra. He returns this week to lead the ensemble through three performances of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a monumental work—and the composer’s last completed symphony — that traverses through a sea of emotions, fueled, but only in part, by the grief he felt over the death of his 4-year-old daughter the summer before he began composing it in 1908. The four-movement work begins in anguish but courses through a bucolic, cheerful ländler and a rather violent burlesque before resolving into a final Adagio that critics have long characterized as a quiet but solid affirmation of life. In honor of Blomstedt’s return to the podium, the orchestra will be outfitted in formal white tie and tails.
Performance times are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in San Francisco’s Davies Hall. Find tickets, $30-$185, at www.sfsymphony.org.
Singing on the signing: Oakland-based intergenerational vocal ensemble Cantare brings together its Adult Chorale and Aurora Choir of high school-age singers to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church at 49 Knox Drive in Lafayette. Called “Until All of Us Are Free,” the concert pays homage to the concept that true liberty only exists when it applies to everyone.
Selections on the program run the gamut of eras and styles, including William Billings’ “Chester” from the Revolutionary period, Howard Hanson’s setting of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Democracy” and the song “Keep Marching” from the current Broadway hit musical “Suffs.” In tribute to those who have served in our armed forces, there will also be a medley of well-known military anthems, plus a rendering of Garth Brooks’ “We Shall Be Free.”
The ticket structure is “pay what you will,” with a suggested $25 donation or $50 for a “pay it forward” donation. Details are at cantareconvivo.org.
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