Article originally appeared at sfchronicle.com by Andrew Gilbert
As an early adopter of social media, Bay Area cellist and composer Zoë Keating parlayed her vast reach on Twitter (@zoecello) to strengthen ties with her legions of far-flung fans. Then she landed in the mainstream media for the worst possible reason.
Two years ago, her husband, graphic designer Jeffrey Rusch, was diagnosed with terminal brain tumors. With a 4-year-old son, their family would have experienced his rapid decline and death as a private tragedy, but when Anthem Blue Cross refused to cover Rusch’s cancer treatment, they became a cause celebre, and the insurer eventually reversed course.
Now, in her first public Bay Area concerts in more than a year, Keating will play two solo SFJazz Center shows on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 14-15, as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival. While she’s been keeping a low profile, hunkered down in rural Sonoma, she’s continued to compose, writing scores for various shows, including the WGN America series “Manhattan.”
“As the catastrophe was unfolding, I had some work commercially, and that was perfect,” says 44-year-old Keating. “It had a framework and purpose. It was still mine, but not quite so personal.”
Vivacious and gently self-mocking, Keating is still deep in mourning some 16 months after Rusch’s death. Later this month she’ll be in Washington, D.C., to participate in Vice President Joe Biden’s “cancer moonshot” summit, and she continues her activism on behalf of copyright reform.
“It seems I keep ending up in this role fighting structural problems, whether in the music industry or health care,” she says. “I just feel this responsibility to point out, ‘Hey, this isn’t working.’ But I have to be careful because that’s a limitless thing.”
“Limitless” might be the best way to describe her music. Inspired by minimalist composers like Henryk Górecki and Steve Reich, she’s developed a lapidary style, employing real-time looping to create lush, enveloping sonic fields that seem to expand and flow organically. She experienced her first compositional epiphany as an undergrad experimenting in the electronic music lab at Sarah Lawrence College in New York when she dissected Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and spliced it back together adding multilayered loops.
“I’ve always been attracted to soundscapes that stay in the same tonal range and create this sense of space,” she says. “When I started making music for myself, I wanted to create a soundtrack for the world, a kind of music that I wanted to hear.”
She jokes that, like many musicians, she writes the same piece over and over again, but her pieces evoke a myriad of emotions, settings and relationships. It’s no coincidence that her effulgent sound has proved irresistible to choreographers — YouTube features thousands of videos of dances set to her work.
Raised in Toronto, Keating moved to San Francisco in 1994 and toiled in a North Beach cafe, saving up with the ambition of enrolling at the San Francisco Conservatory. A paralyzing bout of stage fright at her audition ended up changing her plans. But after answering ads in the back of local newspapers, she started playing with various art rock bands, putting in a particularly fruitful four-year stint with Melora Creager’s cello-powered Rasputina.
Keating also honed her solo music, experimenting with gear while learning to focus and edit her pieces. Within eight years she went from playing shoestring venues like Oakland’s now-defunct improv outpost 21 Grand to closing the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland. Whatever the setting and however well heeled or bohemian her audience, she tries to reach listeners at the most fundamental aspect of their humanity.
“It’s still my job to take people out of time,” she says. “This thing about being human is you’re noticing something and it’s already passed. It’s been a narrative of mine since I was an early teenager that we don’t have very much time. I’m saying that in music, and I want every everyone to go there with me.”
Zoë Keating: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday, June 14-15. $25-$60.
SFJazz Center Miner Auditorium, 201 Franklin St., S.F. (866) 920-5299.
www.sfjazz.org
Watch Zoë Keating perform “Lost” live: