Lauren Shera has a lot to be excited about. In 2003, she opened for former Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh and Friends at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, where Lesh said of Shera that “… her voice will define the next generation of folk singers.” Spark catches up with this young prodigy as she records her first album at Rancho Armadillo studios in Santa Cruz.

Growing up in Monterey, the singer/songwriter/guitarist/poet Shera took an interest in poetry at a young age and soon began winning awards for her work. At the age of 13, she began writing and playing music and performing at open mike nights in local coffeehouses with her signature purple guitar, named “Titania.”

Shunning major label interest, Shera believes that it is very important to remain independent so that she may have as much control as possible over her music. She writes all of her own songs and is recording and releasing her album on her own. The upcoming release, entitled “A Million Light-Years Long,” will be a collection of confessional, personal songs inspired by many of the folk artists Shera admires.

Shera’s singular vision is starting to get attention. The young musician has also performed and appeared with Jason Mraz, Joan Osborne, Greg Brown, Todd Snider, Mindy Smith, Garrison Starr and Iris De Ment.

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Avant-garde pioneer Terry Riley is one of the best-known composers to emerge in the 20th century. Riley is often credited with the introduction of electronic instrumentation and tape looping in American experimental music. In “Masterworks,” Spark visits with Riley and Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington as they prepare “Cusp of Magic,” a piece written for Kronos to be performed in celebration of Riley’s 70th birthday.

Riley is known as one of the innovators of minimalism in music, a style characterized by the repetition of sound patterns, usually through the use of tape delay and feedback systems. Many of Riley’s earliest compositions are largely based on improvisation, often attenuated to unprecedented durations; in the early 1960s, Riley’s largely unscripted harpsichord performances would run for hours, sometimes spanning the entire night, going until dawn.

Riley’s first masterpiece was the 1964 composition “In C,” which remains his most famous work to date. The piece, which repeats 53 phrases continuously for up to 75 minutes, was written for any combination of instruments. Along with noted avant-garde composer La Monte Young’s contemporaneous “Inside the Dream Syndicate,” Riley’s piece is considered a landmark in minimalist music and one of its most recognizable examples.

“Cusp of Magic,” Riley’s 16th commission for the Kronos Quartet, ventures into new territory for both Riley and Harrington. Two of the piece’s movements use digital samples of children’s toys that Harrington has collected on tour ever since he became a grandfather. The toys provide a cacophony of sound that forms a sonic pun on the word “play,” which refers to both the activity of children and the performance of music.

In addition to the toys, “Cusp of Magic” was written to highlight the Chinese lute, or pipa, and one vocal. Wu Man, a pipa virtuoso known worldwide for her colorful and emotional interpretations, was specifically selected for the composition. The piece had its world premiere in May 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, presented by Cal Performances.

Terry Riley studied composition at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, where he met and began collaborating with classmate Young. Influenced by the musical experimentation of both John Cage and John Coltrane, in the early 1960s he began making musique concrete — soundscapes made from combining a variety of sonic sources, including tape loops and found sounds. Over the last five decades, Riley has collaborated with such notable performers and composers as John Cale, Tony Conrad and Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath. His influence can be heard in the work of a wide range of performers, including Can, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, the Silver Apples, Suicide and Stereolab.

More about the Kronos Quartet
The Kronos Quartet is David Harrington and John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola), and Jennifer Culp (cello). Harrington formed Kronos in 1973. Since then, they have performed thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than 40 recordings, collaborated with many composers and performers, and commissioned hundreds of works and arrangements for string quartet. They received a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and the Musicians of the Year award (2003) from Musical America.

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San Francisco musician Cheryl E. Leonard finds her inspiration — and instruments — in the world that surrounds her. Leonard makes music by bowing, tapping, rubbing and otherwise manipulating objects she finds in nature. Spark checks in on this innovative young composer as she prepares a series of five new works entitled “Ziran,” which is Chinese in origin and is used to mean the concept of naturalness.

Leonard begins her process by collecting objects with which she can produce unusual sounds. Though Leonard often includes man-made objects in her performances, for “Ziran” she amassed items only from the natural world, such as bark, rocks, pine cones and twigs. Experimenting with the possibilities of these objects, Leonard composed five pieces inspired by different Tang dynasty poems dating as far back as 1,000 years. Leonard has designed each piece to be performed in conjunction with a recital of its corresponding poem.

As Leonard and her musical collaborators prepare for “Ziran,” they struggle to find the right pitches and textures in each of their created instruments. Because of this unusual instrumentation, which produces sounds outside conventional tonal structures, Leonard has devised a unique system of notation capable of communicating the composer’s intentions to the performers.

Cheryl E. Leonard received a B.A. in music composition from Hampshire College in 1991 and an M.A. from Mills College in 1996. In 1999, Leonard’s “The Underwater Flying Machine” was exhibited as part of Lincoln Center’s Day of Homemade Instruments. Recordings of her music are available from Great Hoary Marmot Records, Apraxia Records, 23 Five Inc., Old Gold Records and The Lab. She has received a commission to design sounds for a new exhibit in the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

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For Salvador Santana, music is the family business. His father is the legendary rock guitarist Carlos Santana, and his uncle Jorge is best known as the leader of the Latin soul band Malo. Also, his paternal grandfather, José Santana, was a prominent Mariachi violinist in San Francisco, and his maternal grandfather was the pioneering R&B guitarist Sanders King. Spark visits with the next generation of the Santana musical dynasty to talk about stepping out from the shadow of his illustrious musical family as the leader of his own band.

Salvador started playing music at a very young age, quickly picking up percussion and guitar. When his father heard the 6-year-old Salvador playing piano to a Thelonious Monk record, he knew his son was destined for a career in music. Now a young man, Salvador is defining his own style of world music, combining jazz instrumentation with a Latin rhythmic sensibility and hip hop vocals. He and his band made their professional debut opening for his father’s group on its European tour in the summer of 2004.

For Salvador, sharing his father’s famous name can be as much a burden as an advantage in the hyper-competitive music industry. Though the Santana name may open record label doors, it also multiplies the pressure on Salvador, who has had to struggle to define himself as a musician in his own right. But Salvador isn’t worried: As long as he’s making music, he knows he’s exactly where he needs to be. Spark trails Salvador into the studio, where he’s been committing his own musical vision to tape, with plans to release a CD.

Salvador Santana has toured with the Salvador Santana Band throughout Eastern and Western Europe and Latin America. In addition to his own CD, he can be heard on his father’s 2005 release “All That I Am,” and on his mother Deborah’s audiobook, “Space Between the Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart.”

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San Francisco’s Mission District is home to numerous roving musicians who perform mostly Mexican music for diners and revelers in the neighborhood’s many bars and restaurants. In the episode “Street Art,” Spark trails the guitar duo of Jacobo Palacios and Rafael Potillo, who go by the name of Los Cazadores del Sur, which translates to “the hunters from the south.”

Coming to the United States from rural Central America — Palacios from Guatemala, Potillo from El Salvador — the two began working as manual laborers, but eventually taught themselves guitar to become street musicians. With a repertoire of more than 80 songs, Palacios and Potillo can play something for everyone, having learned songs from their native countries as well as from South American nations and Mexico.

They are versed in a range of styles, from conjunto, which originated near the Texas border, to northern Mexico’s norteño to the Colombian cumbia, and can play rancheras, corridos and boleros, among other types of songs. In expanding their catalog, Palacios and Potillo have opened their own personal borders, transcending their respective nationalities to become Latinos — cultural citizens of the Spanish-speaking Americas.

Like the Mission’s other troubadours, Los Cazadores frequent taquerias, bars and family restaurants, serenading patrons in the hope that they in turn will show their appreciation with a few dollars. In Latin America, finding audiences by moving from place to place is known as working al talon, meaning literally “on the heel,” and demands a keen knowledge of the ebb and flow of crowds as well as the establishment of good relationships with business owners and fellow musicians.

Though it has its rewards, the life of a street musician is difficult. Los Cazadores regularly work three shifts a day — at lunchtime, and dinnertime, then late night for the bar crowds. In addition, Palacios and Potillo are not free to travel in and out of the country at will, and it has been years since they have been able to visit their families. In the meantime, though, they have surrogate families, composed of the people they see regularly in the Mission — the restaurateurs, servers and patrons whom they serenade every day.

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San Francisco’s bustling Union Square is home to some of the Bay Area’s most tenacious musicians. Earning their income by entertaining passersby, these performers have adapted themselves to the tricky business of making one’s living on the street. In “Street Art,” Spark takes a stroll downtown to check out a few of the hardest-working artists in the city.

Opera singers Robert Close and Litz Plummer are downtown mainstays that set up shop at the end of Maiden Lane, a pedestrian walkway at the edge of Union Square. Close began singing on the street in 1998, at the end of a six-year stint with “Phantom of the Opera.” Despondent and frustrated that his talents were not being exercised on more challenging material, Close began singing on the streets for the adulation and dollars of bystanders. He chose his spot on Maiden Lane for its acoustics, which allow him to project his powerful tenor up to four blocks away.

In search of work after moving to San Francisco three years ago from North Carolina, Plummer found Close by following his voice. She offered her services as a soprano, and the two have been singing together since. It is not an easy gig — many times the two wonder if they will earn enough money to support themselves — but it allows them to practice their craft before an admiring audience.

Across the square, in front of the much acclaimed A.C.T.’s Geary Theater, Earl Gadsden and his singing group, Bay City Luv, belt out gospel tunes for the throngs of theatergoers before and after the A.C.T. performances. Gadsden has been singing gospel for more than 30 years, ever since he was an altar boy in his church in South Carolina. He moved to San Francisco in 1996 and, finding like-minded musicians, assembled an a cappella group to perform gospel on the streets. For Gadsden, gospel is more than a way to raise a few dollars: Every now and then, everything comes together, and the music connects all those assembled in a common bond.

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For more than 40 years, mandolinist and composer David Grisman has been one of bluegrass music’s greatest champions. Based in Sonoma County, Grisman has gained a reputation as both a virtuoso mandolinist and one of the world’s leading proponents of traditional acoustic music. Spark checks in on Grisman as he prepares for an evening of old-time bluegrass at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage Coffee House.

A predominantly Southern style of music, bluegrass is a spirited combination of country, blues and gospel that emerged in the 1940s. As a teenager, Grisman picked up the mandolin after discovering the music of Bill Monroe, who is commonly credited with popularizing bluegrass. By the late 1960s, Grisman began to explore other styles, including jazz, folk and Gypsy music, to create a hybrid form unlike anything that had come before.

In 1975, Grisman founded the David Grisman Quintet, which features Grisman’s mandolin leading in a series of instrumentals that defy easy categorization. Offhandedly naming his new style after a nickname that the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia had given him, Grisman created “dawg” music — a term that remains current in contemporary bluegrass circles.

Like other forms of roots music, bluegrass passes from generation to generation not through formal notation but rather in a live exchange between performers. In an effort to preserve traditional bluegrass, at least once a year he performs an evening of old-time music with his traditional outfit, the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience. It is an event that brings in a wide audience, including bluegrass and country aficionados, folkies, and Dead Heads. Spark is there for the 2004 performance at the Freight and Salvage.

Ever dedicated to preserving acoustic music, Grisman established the Acoustic Disc record label in 1990 in an effort to help establish a recorded legacy of traditional acoustic music from around the world. Since founding Acoustic Disc, Grisman has recorded more than 60 records by almost as many performers and in almost as many genres.

David Grisman was born in New Jersey and began playing bluegrass while attending New York University. While living in Greenwich Village, he recorded with a number of bands, gaining popularity in the burgeoning 1960s folk scene. In 1970, Grisman moved to San Francisco, where he befriended Jerry Garcia and lent his talents to the Grateful Dead classic “American Beauty.” Since then, he has recorded dozens of records, with his own bands and with artists such as Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Earl Scruggs and Django Reinhardt’s collaborator, jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli.

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More than 50 seniors have come from all over the country to take part in the Elderhostel Tiburon American Music Program. Hosted by Barry Adler and led by instructors Don Lewis and Jerry Frohmader, the Elderhostel program teaches seniors to sing and play blues, gospel, jazz and ragtime. Over the course of five days, participants learn to write and perform songs in a fun, informative and disarming program. Although some have performed before, many of the seniors that attend Elderhostel’s program are creating music for the first time.

Lewis grew up in Dayton, Ohio, with a musical family and church community as the major focuses in his life. He attended Tuskegee University and played piano and organ at the Greenwood Baptist Church for Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rallies. He has worked in the studio with such legendary music greats as Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. As a performing artist, he has toured extensively nationally and internationally.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Frohmader is a teacher, composer, performer, conductor and arts administrator. As a professional musician (keyboards and saxophone), he has performed with the New Jersey Symphony and Clark Terry. He presently lives in Corte Madera, where he teaches electronic synthesis, jazz, recording techniques and keyboards privately as well as part time at the College of Marin. He also composes music for television commercials, videos and film.

More about Elderhostel
Founded in 1975, Elderhostel is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing extraordinary learning adventures for people aged 55 and over. Elderhostel offers a wide variety learning programs in locations that span the globe. The Bay Area Classic Learning is the Elderhostel branch in the Bay Area.

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Gathering together some of the best jazz talents in the country, the SFJAZZ Collective meets every year for a two-month residency during which the group’s members rehearse their own compositions as well as those by noted masters. Each year, they get together to practice for their performance at the SFJAZZ Spring Season and the national tour that follows. In the episode “American Music,” Spark visits the ensemble, hard at work as it prepares six compositions by John Coltrane, arranged by Grammy Award-winner Gil Goldstein.

The 2005 octet, assembled by SFJAZZ executive director Randall Kline and artistic director Joshua Redman, is composed of accomplished musicians from around the country, including trumpeter Nicholas Payton, alto saxophonist and flutist Miguel Zenon, pianist Renee Rosnes, Isaac Smith on trombone, bassist Matt Penman, drummer Eric Harland, and Redman himself on tenor sax. But the group’s highlight is vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, a veteran player who has recorded with veritable legends of modern jazz, including Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock.

Even for such accomplished talents, performing Goldstein’s new arrangements of six Coltrane classics can be overwhelming. The work of Coltrane, who is commonly considered to be the most important jazz composer and performer of the modern era, rarely gets reinterpreted by young musicians. His mature style, characterized by hypnotic, soulful melodies deftly interwoven with bursts of dissonant wailing from his tenor sax, presents the interpreter with a challenge that is exceedingly difficult to meet. On the one hand, to merely copy Coltrane’s sound is to ignore the spirit of individual expression that is central to his work; on the other, a voice as personal and penetrating as Coltrane’s may not be found even in a lifetime of practice and introspection.

Founded in 1983 under the name of Jazz in the City, SFJAZZ is the leading nonprofit jazz organization on the West Coast and the sixth-largest performing arts organization in the Bay Area. Dedicated to encouraging the growth of jazz and jazz audiences in San Francisco and beyond, SFJAZZ presents a wealth of year-round programs, including the internationally acclaimed San Francisco Jazz Festival, the SFJAZZ Spring Season program, and numerous community outreach and educational programs.

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Kid Beyond (aka Andrew Chaikin) is a one-person band — using his mouth as his only musical instrument. He can produce the sounds of instruments, hip hop loops, techno beats, turntable scratches and synthesizers. In the episode “Percussion,” Spark gets into the rhythm with him at “The Vowel Movement: A Beatbox Showcase.”

The art of vocal percussion, also known as human beatboxing, is believed to have begun as an urban art form around the same time as hip hop in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in New York City. The term “beatboxing” is derived from the mimicry of the first generation of drum machines, then known as beatboxes. Beatboxing’s early pioneers include Doug E. Fresh, Biz Markie and Buffy from the Fat Boys.

Kid Beyond takes beatboxing further into the modern day through the use of technology. Using foot pedals designed especially for him by a friend at Emeryville’s Expressions Center for New Media, he records parts of his performance in real time, then loops it back live, thus layering lyrics over his own vocal instrumentation. Kid Beyond has shared the stage with James Brown, Ray Charles, LL Cool J, Spearhead, Run-DMC, KRS-One, Blackalicious and the Neville Brothers.

“The Vowel Movement,” created by Bryan Neuberg (aka Process), Kid Beyond and Tim Barsky, is a monthly show in San Francisco at Studio Z. It’s a forum and a venue for beatboxers of all ages, backgrounds and genders to get on stage and practice the art form as well as try out new sounds and techniques.

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When Grand Master Seiichi Tanaka founded the San Francisco Taiko Dojo in 1968, he brought to American shores an art form more than 4,000 years old. Tanaka now has a devoted following that studies this ancient style of Japanese drumming three nights a week, 52 weeks a year. In the episode, “Percussion,” Spark checks in on Tanaka’s world-renowned studio as his students prepare for the 2004 International Taiko Festival held at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

In ancient Japan, taiko was considered a sacred representation of the voice of Buddha. It was employed in a variety of rituals, including those used to drive away evil spirits from crops, send samurai into battle and define the boundaries of a village. Its thunderous pounding was also believed to incite the clouds to begin to rain.

While taiko finds its roots in these folk traditions, the modern version has evolved into a powerful, sophisticated synthesis of rhythm, harmony and choreography. Tanaka, who has performed with such jazz luminaries as Art Blakey, Max Roach and Tito Puente, has crafted his own style of taiko, which combines traditional songs with Western jazz and Latin rhythms.

At the International Taiko Festival, the San Francisco Taiko Dojo performs a series of works, including Tanaka’s most famous composition, “Tsunami” — a roaring, energetic piece that makes ample use of taiko’s most difficult instrument, the large okedo drum.

The San Francisco Taiko Dojo is composed of approximately 200 students, encompassing a range of ages, ethnicities and skill levels. The first and oldest taiko studio in America, the San Francisco Taiko Dojo enjoys worldwide recognition. In addition, the music of Grand Master Tanaka and San Francisco Taiko Dojo has been featured in major motion picture movies — including “The Right Stuff,” “Rising Sun,” “Return of the Jedi” and “Apocalypse Now.”

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World-renowned tabla player Zakir Hussain has both revolutionized Indian percussion and extended its audience worldwide. Over the course of a career that has spanned more than four decades, Hussain has fused Indian classical music with Western jazz, rock and Latin styles, collaborating with Pharoah Sanders, Tito Puente, Joe Henderson and Van Morrison, among others. Spark checks in on the longtime Bay Area resident as he works with some of the region’s most respected performers.

The son of tabla legend Ustad Alla Rakha, Hussain was a child prodigy. He began his musical education at the age of 7 under the tutelage of his father. By the time he was 12, Hussain was performing professionally, touring with the royalty of Indian classical music, including Ali Akbar Kahn, and later, with his father’s longtime collaborator Ravi Shankar. At the age of 19, Hussain moved to the Bay Area and formed lasting musical relationships with the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart.

In 1975, Hussain teamed up with jazz guitarist John McLaughlin and violinist Lakshminarayana Shankar to form Shakti, an ensemble dedicated to fusing jazz with Indian music. He has also been the leader of a number of bands, including the Tal Vadya Rhythm Band, which later became the Diga Rhythm Band, and The Rhythm Experience.

Hussain maintains a grueling touring schedule that has taken him around the globe. Spark catches Hussain’s performance at the San Jose Performing Arts Center, where he and sarode player Alam Khan are accompanied by Indian violinist Kala Ramnath. The event, which attracted an audience of nearly a thousand, reverses the usual instrumental roles as the violin forms a backdrop for Hussain’s percussion.

Ever the innovator, Hussain is relentless in his pursuit of artistic challenges. He has composed film scores, sung, and even acted in a number of films. Spark trails Hussain to the studio of choreographer Alonzo King, who has commissioned him to create and perform a piece for his upcoming tour with the LINES Ballet Company. This will be the first time that an Indian percussionist will perform with a dance ballet — a daunting prospect for Hussain, who will have to fuse Indian music’s improvisational mode with the precise choreography that King has designed for the performance. But Hussain is up to the task — it is an opportunity to explore yet more new territory after decades of experimentation.

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