Editor’s Note: This show has been canceled
Valentine’s Day is almost here, and in San Francisco, it’s a day for great venues and even better music. This year, Berkeley’s Cornerstone is hosting a show by the versatile, genre-hopping sound of Georgia Anne Muldrow.
Widely known for her versatile musical styles, spanning funk, blues, jazz fusion, hip-hop, and electro, Muldrow has been recording and touring since 2006. Her first extended play record The Worthnothings landed as part of the mid-oughts new soul sound from Los Angeles, drawing on a strong, jazz-inflected voice but extrapolating to places undreamt of in that scene even a few decades before; stripped-back production one moment, insistent bass the next. It was a hell of a calling card, and Muldrow followed it up that same year, with her first album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth.
Right from that first step into the world of music, she has been a streak of rarity who was unafraid to defy the rules and experiment with various genres of music. No less an artist than Mos Def had nothing but praise for her: “She’s incredible. She’s like Flack, Nina Simone, Ella, she’s something else. She’s like religion. It’s heavy, vibrational music. I’ve never heard a human being sing like this. Her voice is wild, finely expressive. It’s so singular. It’s hip-hop, the way that she approaches it rhythmically, she’s got so many jazz influences. It’s something else and you can just feel it.” Def wasn’t done: “With Georgia Anne Muldrow Presents Ms. One, she’s like J. Dilla, the legendary producer. She makes her own beats, she rhymes, she sings, and she plays. If people love Amy Winehouse, they’re going to get their minds blown when they hear Georgia Anne Muldrow.”
It’s not unusual for a new artist to score hype like that; but Muldrow has followed up with the goods, to the tune of 16 albums in 12 years, along with collaborations and mixtapes including a collaboration with Stones Throw, crooning the melodious backbone of Mos Def‘s The Ecstatic track “Roses”, or working with Dudley Perkins, Oddisee, Shawn Lee and Oh No.
Over the years, her craft has been honed around a solid core: the integrity and originality of Muldrow’s voice is unchanged: just deepening and enriching, spanning out to take in longer songs and spin out ideas past their first punch, taking beautiful lyric and vocal inventiveness and beating the gold out finer, further, to a better shine. 12 years in, you sense Muldrow is only just getting started.
The venue’s a perfect mix of atmospheric and laid-back, with an expansive, multi-faceted beer hall and American-style kitchen backing up the sound. With one of the best acoustic arrangements in the Bay Area and a spacious layout that includes up to three green rooms, VIP mezzanine viewing, and a great view of the stage throughout the space, Cornerstone is the perfect place to enjoy some skillfully-played, heartfelt live music. This Valentine’s Day might be the ideal time, and Cornerstone the perfect place, to get some of Muldrow’s musical magic into your life.
Georgia Anne Muldrow plays the Cornerstone with special guest Declaime & Friends, Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist (True Skool) // Wednesday Feb 14, 2018 // Doors: 7:30 PM // Show: 8:30 PM // All Ages
