The Crooked Jades
Bluegrass/Old-Timey/String Band
The Crooked Jades are a groundbreaking, internationally influential band from the San Francisco Bay Area with more than 11 albums under their belt, including the recent, highly acclaimed Empathy Moves the Water.
Other releases include World’s on Fire (featuring a track chosen by Sean Penn for the soundtrack of Oscar-nominated film Into the Wild) and Seven Sisters: A Kentucky Portrait (the soundtrack to the award-winning PBS documentary of the same name). They composed the soundtrack for the 2023 award-winning documentary Call Me Mule. Two of their albums were co-produced by alt-country’s Richard Buckner.
The Crooked Jades have also collaborated with contemporary dance choreographers Kate Weare and San Francisco dance company ODC founder and artistic director Brenda Way. They were nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award in 2019 for Outstanding Achievement in Music/Sound for the ODC’s World’s on Fire production.
The band was featured on the KQED television and online program Spark, which takes the audience inside the creative process to witness the challenges, opportunities, and rewards of making art.
The core of The Crooked Jades are co-founders Jeff Kazor (vocals/guitar/ukulele), Lisa Berman (vocals/slide guitar/banjo), and Erik Pearson (vocals/banjos/ukulele/slide guitar). Our two sensational new band members are, on fiddle, the phenomenal Amy Kassir, hailing from Durham, North Carolina, and on bass, the multi-talented arco bass player JZ (Joshua Zucker).
"This San Francisco quintet keep true to their old-time string band heart, yet in subtle, weird ways, they exaggerate the slightly-crazed aura of the rural pre-radio era music. It makes for a haunting, sophisticated trip to Appalachia. Mixing originals and traditional songs flawlessly, this might be the finest band to come out of the string-band resurgence."
Boston Herald
"The Jades are the perfect combination of fresh energy and raw antiquity, staying so true to the old stuff you feel like you’re hearing ghosts of the past. Yet their performance is vibrant enough that at one point I actually had an honest to goodness religious experience."
MerleFest
"I love The Crooked Jades. Weird, ecstatic music. How can anyone with a brain dislike it? What was the Aldous Huxley line? "Stronger wine, madder music."
Peter Stampfel, The Holy Modal Rounders
"The Crooked Jades ensemble, with its polished but vital roots sound, is no stranger to modern media. They’ve contributed to the soundtracks of the PBS documentary Seven Sisters: A Kentucky Portrait and the Oscar-nominated dramatic movie Into The Wild. Their sound can be as cinematic as it is tradition-grown.
If you have it, you’ll be richly rewarded. Visualize the dancing in your mind’s eye while this lovely, lively and compelling music flows into your ears. The Crooked Jades’ soundtrack for the Kate Weare Company’s Bright Land is happy evidence that old-time music is not only a relevant contemporary art form, it will probably prove timeless."
BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED
"Wild, wooly, totally unpredictable but always tasteful, soulful. They’ve got chords in unexpected places, out of this world harmonies and some of the most powerfully arranged material I’ve ever encountered."
Bluegrass Breakdown