On the Coastal Trail at Lands End, the site of a free open-air performance of John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” on Saturday, July 29, a reverent mob roamed the hillside. The performance, witnessed by thousands of music lovers alongside park-goers who happened to be traipsing around, was part of a six-event SFJazz tribute to the composer, a collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

At the top of the hill, you could look down at the crowd walking from musician to musician, along the crisscrossed pathways splayed on the hillside, and see an image like a Bruegel painting with puffy-jacketed villagers moving through a rural landscape. If one’s glance met the glance of another music lover in the “audience,” one smiled.

Those weren’t the facial expressions of the musicians, some 60 of whom were studying the music, looking at the instruments, seriously focused on the music rather than the crowd. Percussionist Riley Nicholson said after the performance that they’d been asked to try for “the facial expressions you’d have if you were walking down the street with your iPhone’s earphones on,” to reflect an individual response to the music.

As listeners made their way through the crowd from musician to musician, the sound of each overtook the sound of the last; they were playing together, but it was as if they were playing alone. There were no metronomes, no visible conductor waving a baton to keep the beat.

“We were supposed to be thinking about a clock, and 60 seconds,” said Nicholson.

Back to Gallery Lands End hillside becomes concert hall for Adams’... 4 1 of 4 2 of 4 Photo: Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle 3 of 4 Photo: Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle 4 of 4 Photo: Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle







“It felt like public solitude,” added Allen Biggs. “We performed in a place I have known all my life: Lands End. The foghorn, wind, birds, footsteps on gravel added texture to the tapestry of sound.” Biggs said he could see, at one point, that “a whale was spouting beyond Seal Rock. Nobody noticed, as they were watching us playing music.”

“Each player is a soloist, with an underlying pulse of 60 beats to the second,” said composer Adams, who, after the 80-or-so-minute-performance, stood easily answering questions from anyone who approached. The musicians listen to each other, and use that “underlying pulse of 60,” the time of a clock or a heart at rest, to locate themselves in the music.

Adams had written the piece to be performed by any number of musicians divisible by three, from nine to 99, by three families of instruments: air (conches, whirly tubes), metal (triangles, glockenspiels), drums. “Nothing really represents anything,” said Adams, “except maybe the winds. I wanted the piece to come out of the air.”

The work has been played before, and the composer said he thought that this performance’s opening was “particularly beautiful — one of the best.” A single conch player was joined by another, then the sound of a rock being rubbed against a board, then other instruments joined. It was only at the end, when orchestra bells sent high notes pinging from one to another, that you could hear a melody repeated.

“There’s a culture that’s grown up around the gathering,” said SFJazz Artistic Director Randall Kline. “Musicians make it their own.” The Saturday gathering was “more than I had hoped. But he is one of the greatest composers in our time,” Kline added. “And we presented this thing in a beautiful natural setting. Who wouldn’t want to go to that?”

In the parking lot at Lands End, Nancy Friedman said she had seen a car with a bumper sticker that read, “Think about honking if you love conceptual art.” And as we made our way out of the park, a man in the crowd stopped me, smiled and said, “Be sure to write about this one. It was … sacramental.”

P.S. I was among the majority of people in the crowd using their cell phones to capture pictures of this event. Maybe those pictures are handy to show to friends later, to illustrate one’s spoken description. Maybe, for me, the pictures could turn up with the online version of this column. At the same time, after a while, it seemed to me that I could listen and watch much better by letting my memory be the recording device.

Mentally, I can call it up over and over again, listen to a scrap, zoom in to a close-up or zoom out to a long shot. And if anything is ever forgotten ... well, then, I needn’t dredge it up from my phone, because if it’s forgotten, it wasn’t important anyway. As the bumper sticker said, that’s a concept.

Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik

Public Eavesdropping

Guy No. 1: “Ya gotta nip this thing in da bud.” Guy No. 2: “There ain’t no effing bud.”

Man to man, overheard on Fillmore Street by Isadora Alman