Lumama got its start as three close friends sharing their most personal music. From that place, guitarist Luis Salcedo, drummer Marshall Williams, and bassist Matt Roads have joined forces with musical luminaries Nathan Bickart on piano and Sam Priven on alto saxophone. The compositions are honest and communal, the arrangements are full of color and life, and the improvisation is superb. This ensemble delivers the best that modern jazz has to offer while the audience feels as comfortable as sitting in their best friends’ living room. The quintet’s debut album is due out later this year.
Nathan Bickart crafts sensitive, visceral, warm music that insists upon the inherent goodness of all life on Earth. Joined by the extraordinarily-talented Owen Clapp (bass) and Michael Mitchell (drums), Bickart’s trio composes and improvises from a deeply collaborative aesthetic, valuing folk-song melodies that hold audience members in wrapped attention, recognizing that three notes played in unity are stronger than 300 played apart. They build upon the piano trio traditions of artists ranging from Ahmad Jamal to Robert Glasper, recognizing the ways in which musical and spiritual practices can be folded into our complex and busy modern existence. Their original music contains the echoes of their San Francisco Bay Area homes: from the verdant hills of West Marin to the bustling diversity of downtown Oakland. The trio released their debut album ‘Poem’ in 2018, and toured the West Coast of the United States in support of the album.
