Jahari Stampley Trio
Bands featuring two generations of the same family have become increasingly common as classic-rock veterans bring in their sons or daughters to perform alongside them, as is the case with such Rock & Roll Hall of Famers as the Beach Boys, Cheap Trick and John Fogerty.
The late blues stalwart Guitar Shorty often performed with his mother on keyboards, while cutting-edge jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman’s go-to drummer was often his son, Denardo, and gospel-music guitar and vocal powerhouse Sister Rosetta Tharpe did some recordings with her mandolin-playing mother, Katie Bell Nubin.
But rising jazz piano phenom Jahari Stampley — the winner of the 2023 Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz International Competition — may be the only young artist anywhere currently leading a jazz trio that features one of the member’s mothers.
In the case of this 25-year-old Chicago native, it’s his own mother, saxophonist, pianist, bassist, organist and synthesizer player D-Earania Stampley, who performs alongside him and 21-year-old drummer Miguel Russell. This mother-and-son pairing is notable for its family ties, certainly, especially since the elder Stampley — who heads her own music school — was a key mentor to her son, who took up piano when he was 14.
But both Stampleys would merit attention on their own in any band. And Jahari Stampley, who was just 21 when he ed bass great Stanley Clarke’s group, is so prodigious that jazz piano Hancock has likened him to jazz keyboard giant Art Tatum, “in a more modern form.”
Released in 2023, Stampley’s debut album, “Still Listening,” at times evokes the work of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Hancock himself. But Stampley is already developing a distinctive artistic voice, and — as his album demonstrates — is clearly more interested in serving the music at hand than in showingboating.
In addition to piano, the younger Stampley also plays drums and bass, so expect any number of switches in instrumentation when he and his trio make their San Diego debut this weekend.
5 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $66.50-$83 for the 5 p.m. performance; $57.50-$73 for the 7:30 p.m. performance. The JAI at Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, 7600 Fay Ave. theconrad.org
Haley Heynderickx & The Westerlies, with Kalia Vanderver
Oregon singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx is not the first artist to team up with the New York brass quartet the Westerlies, a list that also includes everyone from Bon Iver, Common, Fleet Foxes and Bill Frisell to Aoife O’Donovan, Vieux Farka Touré and Theo Bleckmann.
But the combination of her lilting voice, fingerpicked guitar work and intimate, understated songs with The Westerlies’ ingeniously constructed arrangements sounds fresh and wonderfully distinctive.
The Westerlies, who performed here in 2016 as part of the now sadly dormant Fresh Sound concert series, are captivating on their own. So is Heynderickx, whose penchant for alternate tunings, quirky arrangements and offbeat sense of humor suggests she has spent a fair amount of time absorbing the music of six- and twelve-string guitar master Leo Kottke.
8 p.m. Tuesday. Belly Up, 143 South Cedros Ave., Solana Beach. $27.50-$49. bellyup.com
Canned Heat
I am usually very reluctant to recommend veteran bands that rose to prominence in the 1960s or 1970s and now have just one member still on board from their classic lineup.
But there are a few reasons to make an exception for Canned Heat, starting with the fact that its best-known lineup only lasted from 1967 to 1969, the same year this Los Angeles-bred blues-boogie band performed at Woodstock.
There have been at least 41 more lineups of Canned Heat since then. Moreover, there were six iterations of the group prior to the 1967 edition that saw Mexico City-born drummer Alfredo “Fito” de la Parra up, following a stint playing in Tijuana with Mexican rock pioneer Javier Batiz, who died last month at the age of 80.
The tireless drummer, now 78, has been the only musician to perform in every version of Canned Heat since 1967. He is also the only surviving member of its classic lineup. The band’s flute-led, rock-a-boogie hit, “Going Up the Country,” plays over the opening credits of the Oscar-winning “Woodstock” film documentary, but Canned Heat’s performance at the fabled festival was edited out because of apparent record company politics.
Canned Heat is on tour in of its first new studio album in 15 years, “Finyl Vinyl.” Its a solid effort that finds de la Parra sounding as propulsive as ever.
His longevity is likely a happy surprise for the drummer, who in a 2009 Union-Tribune interview told me: “I never expected to be alive at this time. Many of us are trying to recapture those feelings (of ‘Woodstock’), knowing that we’ll be gone in just a few years. This is our chance to feel what we felt before.”
8 p.m. Wednesday. Belly Up, 143 South Cedros Ave., Solana Beach. $35-$62. bellyup.com
