Two rising jazz stars cross paths (again) in the Bay Area this weekend
The paths of two of the most exciting young vocalists in jazz keep converging in interesting places.
Most conspicuously, in 2023, Tyreek McDole, 25, and Ekep Nkwelle, 26, encountered each other when McDole became only the second male singer to win the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in New Jersey. Nkwelle placed third.
“I remember watching Tyreek perform and he just killed that blues,” Nkwelle said on a recent video call with McDole. “I was thinking, I have blues on my set, maybe I should change it up.”
Their itineraries cross again in the Bay Area in the coming days, when Nkwelle plays a three-night run at UC Davis’s Mondavi Center, Feb. 12-14, with a trio led by the brilliant 27-year-old pianist Julius Rodriguez. She performs with the same group Feb. 15 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society and Feb. 16 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
McDole plays four shows at SFJAZZ Center Feb. 12-13 with an acoustic quintet featuring the rising 25-year-old piano star Caelan Cardello. He returns to town for a three-night run at Black Cat Feb. 27-29 with HVLT, a plugged-in band with a very different concept.
At SFJAZZ he’s focusing on songs from his acclaimed 2025 debut album “Open Up Your Senses” and an upcoming release. HVLT, pronounced “high voltage,” is an electric group “that explores more jazz-rock fusion, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane sounds,” said McDole, who also plays keyboards and uses a sampler in the group, “so you hear the voices of Miles and Geri Allen.”
The Black Cat engagement marks HVLT’s first performances outside of New York City. The group is built on Michael Shekwoaga Ode, “a great drummer pushing the music forward,” McDole said. “Everyone has a really strong foot in the tradition, but is also playing more contemporary music from the late 1970s and forward, a continuation of all this Black music that’s been happening.”
McDole first encountered Nkwelle shortly after graduating from Oberlin Conservatory and moving to New York City. She was in her second year at Juilliard and frequenting a jam session at the Harlem nightspot Massawa.
“I was just walking by, figuring out who’s who when I heard Ekep,” he said. “I remember thinking, I’m not singing after her! We ended up talking and she was so kind.”
Alongside a cast of veteran jazz stars like Kurt Elling and Cécile McLorin Salvant, the two young vocalists were recruited for “The Kenny Barron Songbook.” The recent album by the 82-year-old piano giant focuses on compositions Barron originally conceived as instrumental pieces, either set with lyrics or delivered with wordless vocal lines.
Barron has featured them each with his trio on recent performances, such as McDole’s Lesher Center date last month with the NEA Jazz Master. The two newcomers were both scouted by Barron, who’s known for championing young talent.
Nkwelle was performing at the 2024 Jazz Congress in New York City at a memorial for one of her mentors, guitarist Russell Malone, when she spotted Barron in the audience during the sound check.
He sought her out after the show and said, “‘I’m recording on Sunday and I want you to be there,’” she recalled. “I have two days to get this together! What an honor to be in his presence.”
McDole was on the Jazz Cruise in 2024 when he started noticing, with some trepidation, that Barron was coming by his sets. “After the last one he came by and said ‘Can I get a picture with you and my wife?’ I said, ‘No, I’m getting a picture with you!’”
While McDole casts a wider stylistic net than Nkwelle, both vocalists are deeply shaped by their hyphenated identities as the children of immigrants. McDole’s mother is Haitian-Dominican, which is partly why he’s resisted being pigeonholed as a jazz artist.
“When it comes to what I focus on, Haitian folklore and different pockets of Black music developed in the Americas, I love all of it,” he said. “I love to highlight Black compositions that reflect on our place in the world. Like Nina Simone said, it’s my duty is to reflect the times.”
For Nkwelle, whose parents moved from Cameroon to Washington, D.C., embracing jazz as a creative calling makes an important statement.
“I’m in a different basket than Tyreek,” she said. “You wouldn’t necessarily think someone named Ekep Nkwelle would be singing the blues. You’d think it’s West African, Cameroonian. I’ve been gifted in this area and really grounded myself in American classical music.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
McDOLE & NKWELLE
Ekep Nkwelle: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 12-14 at Mondavi Center at UC Davis; $56.50-$76.50; www.mondaviarts.org; 4:30 p.m. Feb. 15 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $50-$60 ($12 livestream); bachddsoc.org; 7 p.m. Feb. 16 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $21 $42; www.kuumbwajazz.org
Tyreek McDole Quintet: 7 and 8:30 p.m. Feb. 12-13 at SFJAZZ Center; San Francisco; $39; www.sfjazz.org.
HVLT: 7 and 9:30 p.m. Feb. 27-29 at Black Cat Jazz Supper Club, San Francisco; $20-60; blackcatsf.turntabletickets.com