Urban Crawl by SLUGish Ensemble

Among the many ways that the advent of the pandemic transformed reality was the radical constriction of everyday life. For composer Steven Lugerner the lockdown inspired deep introspection, but also newfound fascination with his immediate environment. When we last heard from the San Francisco multi-wind player and his SLUGish Ensemble on 2023’s In Solitude, Lugerner was surveying his bucolic neighborhood on the slopes of Mt. Davidson and taking stock of the tectonic forces unleashed by covid (with a cadre of brilliant young Bay Area improvisers). Back with mostly the same cast of players, he responds to a different cityscape and state of mind on Urban Crawl, an arrestingly alluring set of original tunes slated for June 20, 2025 release by Slow & Steady Records on vinyl, CD, and streaming.

The director of educational and festival programming at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, Lugerner has collaborated and recorded with many of jazz’s most celebrated and influential artists, including pianists Larry Willis, Fred Hersch, Taylor Eigsti and Myra Melford, drummers Tootie Heath, Allison Miller and Matt Wilson, soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, flutist Jamie Baum, and bassist John Hébert, just for starters. He’s led a wide variety of ensembles over the past two decades, and his third studio album with SLUGish Ensemble finds Lugerner in a meditative space, looking out at the world with wonder and gratitude. Patient and lapidary, the music seems to revel in San Francisco’s legendary beauty, eschewing the grit and squalor that has dominated headlines in recent years.

In many ways Urban Crawl is “a continuation of our last record, In Solitude,” Lugerner says. “I wrote all the In Solitude music during the pandemic living in the Miraloma neighborhood of San Francisco, and it was such a reflection of that place and feeling connected to Mt. Davidson.” By the time he composed the tunes for Urban Crawl, he had moved to a much denser block on Nob Hill in the shadow of Grace Cathedral, and the new music flowed from a very different setting. Rather than feeling constricted by the asphalt, Lugerner turns his gaze to the horizon, writing tunes marked by lithe, flowing lines and lush textures.

He titled the compositions to reflect his perambulations around the neighborhood, like the intricately layered opening track “Taylor & Broadway,” an intersection that provides “an epic view of the city,” he says. With its mesmerizing cyclical structure, the briskly grooving “Washington & Taylor” emerged from watching the repetitive flow of the cable cars. The beautifully calibrated piano solo by Colin Hogan captures the affection and wonder these antique vehicles inspire in even the most gimlet-eyed San Franciscan. The urban pace picks up with the bustling “California & Fillmore,” a measured but urgent sojourn that builds tandem solos with a seamless transition from Hogan’s lustrous Wurlitzer to Ian McArdle’s shimmering synthesizer.

Hogan and McArdle are new additions to the SLUGish constellation. They’re both essential members of the Bay Area music scene whose presence on a gig serves as a reliable indicator that interesting music is going down. Lugerner gave them a good deal of leeway “with parts that were pretty bareboned,” he says. “I leaned on them to breathe something into these parts. I told Ian he doesn’t need to be comping all the time, I told him to lean on sounds and textures. Colin harmonized a lot of written parts in real time. His brain works superfast. But it’s not only their great musicianship. I wanted it to be a local band, representing the Bay, because the music is so San Francisco centric.”


The stellar rhythm section features versatile guitarist Justin Rock, who’s played in many of the Bay Area’s most creative ensembles over the past decade. Holding down the drum chair is Michael Mitchell, a deeply musical and intuitive player whose dynamic range and rhythmic precision make him an anchor for the ensemble. Rounding out the group is bassist Giulio Xavier Cetto, arguably the region’s first-call bassist for the local scene and for touring New York players in need of some serious creative voltage.

Another thing that has changed since In Solitude is that Lugerner has narrowed his instrumental focus. On the 2023 album he moved between bass clarinet, baritone sax, and alto flute. For Urban Crawl his low-end jones focuses exclusively on bass clarinet, the instrument he’s “probably most passionate about, but it wasn’t really a conscious decision,” he says, noting that during lockdown, with no gigs on the horizon, he was less inclined to shed on saxophone. “The pandemic shifted things around. Picking up the alto was a struggle. It’s got such a lineage, and it felt tough to shed bebop and tunes for no gigs. With the bass clarinet I felt a lot more freedom in the moment to create something new, and it felt more connected to my classical upbringing which was inspiring in a different way.”

The album closes with “Stow Lake Drive,” the only piece not designated by a specific intersection. It’s a contemplative theme that builds a gentle pulse of tension with its circular motion. If a sense of wonder and awe pervades Urban Crawl, the concluding track gently places an exclamation point at the end of the journey. For Lugerner, the music captures San Francisco’s miraculous setting, with each destination “reminding me that I’m just this little microscopic thing in a sea of beauty,” he says. “San Francisco gets such a bad rap. Maybe what I’m trying to describe is a more macro view of the city, zooming out, looking out at the buildings, how they lay on top of the hills.”

As an artist, Lugerner has always thought big. Born on May 20, 1988, in Redwood City and raised in Burlingame, a city on the peninsula just south of San Francisco, he grew up in a multicultural, artistically nurturing family. In his youth, Lugerner performed on clarinet, oboe and alto saxophone with community college orchestras and professional pit orchestras while simultaneously organizing and performing local jazz and indie rock performances at local cafes and rec centers. In 2006, he moved to New York City to attend the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music where he graduated with honors four years later, while expanding his instrumental bailiwick to include baritone and soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, English horn, flute and alto flute.

He moved to Brooklyn in 2010 and maintained an active schedule recording and performing throughout the country with ensembles under his own name as well as being a member of the experimental pop group In One Wind, the collective jazz trio CHIVES and post-core quartet killerBOB. His double debut album made it clear he was not a typical jazz musician, with two distinct projects featuring a septet of fellow New School graduates with trumpeter Itamar Borochov, pianist Glenn Zaleski and tenor saxophonist Lucas Pino on Narratives and a quartet with Myra Melford, Matt Wilson and trumpeter Darren Johnston on the second disc, These Are the Words (the same formidable ensemble featured on Lugerner’s 2013 release For We Have Heard).

Since moving back to the Bay Area in 2013 Lugerner maintained a bi-coastal presence, while playing an ever larger role on the West Coast scene. His leadership role at the Stanford Jazz Workshop makes him a conduit between jazz masters and some of the music’s most gifted young students. Slow & Steady Records, the artist-centric label he created with trumpeter Ross Eustis, has released a series of critically hailed projects. His own albums have ranged from JACKNIFE: Music of Jackie McLean, and the free improv duo series Gravitations, which includes a volume with guitarist/banjoist Angelo Spagnolo, another with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan and a session with piano great Fred Hersch. SLUGish Ensemble has been his primary vehicle in recent years, and the band’s expanding creative purview is effectively represented by the growing stature of its mascot, the California banana slug.

“This is the third SLUGish studio album, and the first one (Eight Out of Nine) featured album art with a banana slug in its natural wooded environment,” Lugerner notes. “The next one, In Solitude, had a much bigger slug crawling up Mt. Davidson with the viewer looking at Sutro Tower and downtown San Francisco. The album art for Urban Crawl features a King Kong-sized slug wrapped around the Transamerica Pyramid. In a way, the slug has evolved and grown across the three covers—just like the band and the music have continued to evolve and stretch into new territory.”

As a bandleader, composer and improviser with a rarified sense of balance, Lugerner has embraced his namesake gastropod, creating beatific SLUGish soundscapes unlike any other denizen in the jazz kingdom. With Urban Crawl, he offers a bracing antidote to despair, angst and ennui.

Steven Lugerner is a San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalist and composer known for his “textured, nearly seamless blend of composition and improvisation” (Village Voice). As leader of SLUGish Ensemble, he blends jazz, chamber music, and experimental sounds into a bold, personal style shaped by years in NYC and the Bay Area.

stevenlugerner.com
slowandsteadyrecords.com