Globally Infused Music
San Francisco Chronicle
NIGHTLIFE
Andrew Gilbert

Irene Sazer was ready for a musical party, but tonight’s event at Freight & Salvage wasn’t what she had in mind. A force on the Bay Area music scene for two decades, the violinist corrals her far-flung musical passions in the Real Vocal String Quartet, a band that weaves together the textures of a vocal ensemble and a string band with a mix of original songs and Sazer’s arrangements of tunes from Ireland, Kenya and Brazil.

Featuring violinist-violist Dina Maccabee, cellist Jessica Ivry and violinist Alisa Rose, the band showcases some of the region’s most creative young string players and vocalists. But in the midst of working on the quartet’s first album, Sazer was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and although her prognosis is good, she’s been forced to put the project on hold.

“This band started out with my vision, but has taken on a truly collaborative vision,” Sazer says from her home in West Berkeley. “Everybody is an improviser and composer, and they’re all so talented and creative. I’m damn sad I have to take a break. This was going to be our yearly concert at the Freight. Hopefully, I’ll get better and back in the saddle soon.”

Instead of canceling the gig, Maccabee and fiddler Kaila Flexer put out the word to Sazer’s musical colleagues, turning tonight’s show into a benefit for Sazer, who will take the stage if she’s feeling up to it. Among the musicians scheduled to perform are singer-songwriter Vienna Teng, Aux Cajunals multi-instrumentalist Suzy Thompson, fiddler Amy Hofer, the Crooked Jades’ Erik Pearson on banjo, reed master Sheldon Brown, klezmer mandolinist Gerry Tenney, jazz and blues guitarist John Schott, and avant-garde cabaret vocalist Amy X Neuburg, a cast that reflects the many stylistic circles through which Sazer moves.

Raised in a musical family from Los Angeles — her father, Victor Sazer, a longtime fixture on the L.A. studio scene, is author of the instructional book “New Directions in Cello Playing” — Sazer graduated from the Peabody Conservatory and settled in the Bay Area in 1985.

Within weeks, she helped launch the pioneering, jazz-steeped Turtle Island String Quartet. She’s served as concertmaster of the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic and performed with the Oakland and San Francisco symphonies, while playing or recording with everyone from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles to Ali Akbar Khan, David Grisman and Bjork.

“The thing I’ve always appreciated about Irene is that she’s mischievous and playful, like a sprite, and at the same time she can tear into that violin and play like crazy,” says Flexer, who started collaborating with Sazer 20 years ago in the quirky Composers’ Cafeteria band. “I run into a lot of kids who have studied with her. She’ll teach a heavy-metal tune on violin or whatever they want to do.”