Feb 14: Trumpeter/composer Sarah Wilson Valentine's Day Album Release Concert

Composer/trumpeter and California native Sarah Wilson celebrates Valentine’s Day with an album release concert on Saturday, February 14 at Della Fattoria

Wilson’s acclaimed, joy-filled release Incandescence features her sextet Brass Tonic on an exuberant set sparked by the work of Austrian painter Thomas Reinhold

“Wilson swings naturally between genres and styles, blurring any stylistic boundaries with confidence and charm.” – Eyal Hareuveni, All About Jazz

“A singular jazz artist with a tremendously evocative book of original material.”
– Andrew Gilbert, Contra Costa Times

Community spirit has been a constant in the work of composer/trumpeter Sarah Wilson, whose experiences and inspirations have ranged from socially conscious puppet theater to brass band and New Orleans traditions to her own illuminating style of jazz. Wilson grew up in Healdsburg, CA playing trumpet in school bands, eventually receiving the McCord Alumni Scholarship from HHS to study music in New York City. She now resides again locally in Petaluma.

Wilson celebrates her recent release Incandescence with an album release concert on Saturday, February 14 at Della Fattoria Downtown Café, 143 Petaluma Boulevard North, Petaluma, CA. Wilson’s Bay Area ensemble Brass Tonic performs with Wilson on trumpet and Kasey Knudsen (alto sax), Mara Fox (trombone), John Schott (guitar), Lisa Mezzacappa (bass), and Jason Levis (drums). Doors open at 7 p.m., performance at 7:30 p.m. Tickets $49.87. Tickets and information at sarahwilsonmusic.com/gigs.

During a 2023 artist residency in Krems, Austria, Wilson experienced an epiphany when she encountered the paintings of Viennese artist Thomas Reinhold. One of the founding figures of German “New Painting” or “Junge Wilde,” Reinhold’s large-scale work combines architectural planning with the chance effects of time. Wilson’s reaction to the paintings inspired the music on Incandescence.

Released July 18, 2025 via Wilson’s own Brass Tonic Records and co-produced by Wilson and Grammy Award-winning producer Hans Wendl, Incandescence was commissioned by InterMusic SF’s Musical Grant Program. It draws equal inspiration from Reinhold’s bold, multi-hued abstracts and from the street level, community-spirited traditions of brass band, marching and New Orleans parade music. In Brass Tonic, Wilson combines an all-woman horn frontline with a buoyant rhythm section.

Wilson has emerged as "one of the most intriguing and promising composers and trumpeters on the contemporary music scene,” (San Francisco Chronicle). While deeply shaped by jazz, Wilson’s music stylistically owes as much to avant pop, Afro-Latin grooves and indie rock as the post-bop continuum. Wilson’s artistic work reflects a dynamic interplay of theater, jazz, dance, and film, which frame her unique, fresh compositional style. Wilson has earned wide critical acclaim for her recordings on Brass Tonic Records, including Kaleidoscope (2021) and Trapeze Project (2010), on which she’s joined by a nonpareil cast of improvisers including pianist Myra Melford, drummer Matt Wilson, violinist Charles Burnham, bassist Jerome Harris, guitarist John Schott, clarinetist Ben Goldberg and drummer Scott Amendola. Her music is fueled by large-scale community-based arts projects including a 2022-23 vocal music production, Tenderloin Voices, in collaboration with the Tenderloin Museum and Larkin Street Youth Services working with formerly shelterless youth. She was a 2011-2012 Artist Fellow at the de Young Museum with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The James Irvine Foundation and created Off the Walls, a music and aerial dance production in collaboration with LA-based dance company Catch Me Bird. Wilson has received numerous commissions from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Center for Cultural Innovation, SF Arts Commission, Fleishhacker Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, East Bay Community Foundation, New Music USA, and Intermusic SF as well as residencies at the AIR-Artist in Residence Niederösterreich in Krems, Austria, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Z Space, and Stags’ Leap Winery.

Brass Tonic played its first gig in 2022, but the seeds for the band were planted more than 20 years before, when Wilson performed with and composed for NYC drummer Kenny Wollesen’s protest-minded marching jazz band, Himalayas. Or perhaps even earlier, when she toured the world playing music with Vermont’s politically radical and community-oriented Bread & Puppet Theater during the 1990s leading to a six-year tenure at Lincoln Center for the Arts Out of Doors Festival spearheading music for an annual puppet show. “Coming from that background of street theater and traditional New Orleans music, my music is always something that you can dance to,” Wilson explains. “Marching band music has to be simple, but I wanted to hone it into more developed music with a similar vibe.”

Stemming in part from the socially conscious aspects of those earlier projects as well as her experience in ensembles like the Montclair Women’s Big Band, Wilson was determined to forefront women in her new sextet. “I wanted to be intentional about that,” she insists. “It feels empowering to have a majority of women in the band, and in particular to have all women horn players. That's one area in classical and jazz music, where there's a bit of a lag in terms of equity.”

Earlier music for the band was written in 2022 during Wilson’s time at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. Through that connection, she traveled to Austria for the AIR-Artist in Residence Niederösterreich, through which she was given free rein to explore the arts-rich town of Krems, 50 miles outside of Vienna. There she found Reinhold’s work in the State Gallery of Lower Austria. “These incredible paintings just looked like music to me,” Wilson says.

Three of the compositions on Incandescence – “Architecture in Space,” “Music Appears to Stand Still,” and “Echoes Refrain” – resulted from Wilson’s Austrian residency. But they share with the remainder of the album’s songs a bright, iridescent sense of joy and ebullience encapsulated in the album’s title. “When you have visceral, powerful experience with art or music, that is the essence of joy for me,” Wilson concludes. “I really respond to that ability for music to evoke strong feelings. That’s what I really wanted to happen with this project. I want people to feel good and to have that experience of joy.”

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