News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO’S ICONIC Fillmore Jazz Festival returns for its 35th year on July 6 and 7, promising a vibrant weekend of music, arts and community spirit. Spanning Fillmore Street from Jackson to Eddy, this year’s festival is back at full strength, presenting an impressive lineup across five stages and showcasing the talents of 25 local…
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS Members of Calvary Presbyterian Church’s choir are on a two-week tour of Europe, taking the high-level musicianship of the Fillmore Street church to historic sites in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The choir joined singers from other choirs in commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day in the Normandy region of northwestern…
IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a photo from the neighborhood is published in The New York Times. But today is that day. Alongside a review of Cosmic Scholar, a new biography of anthropologist/artist/filmmaker/mystic/music collector Harry Smith, is a photograph of Smith before one of the murals in the legendary Fillmore jazz club Jimbo’s Bop City.…
NEW NEIGHBORS | CHASE ROBERTS There will be no jazz festival on Fillmore this Fourth of July weekend, but Victoria Wasserman is determined to bring music back to one block of the street. Wasserman is opening Vic’s Winehouse at 1870 Fillmore and turning the Wine Jar into a wine bar with music. “I was devastated…
SAN FRANCISCO’S Fillmore District — known as the “Harlem of the West” in the 1940s and ’50s — was once a cathedral of jazz, its dozens of clubs inhabited by celestial beings such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. The Fillmore’s heyday marked an important chapter not only in jazz history…
FOR THE FIRST TIME in decades, there will be no jazz on Fillmore Street this Fourth of July weekend. The annual Fillmore Jazz Festival has been canceled due to the coronavirus and the ban on large gatherings of people. “Sister! I just want to cry because there’s no festival this weekend,” said jazz vocalist Kim…
FILLMORE’S ONLY remaining joint — the Boom Boom Room, hard by the Geary Street bridge — is closed and may not reopen without an infusion of fresh cash. “We are faced with permanent closure without emergency funding,” says owner Zander Andreas in a fundraising campaign seeking to raise $60,000. “The survival of our intimate and…
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER At only 25, opera singer and neighborhood resident Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen has already had a head-spinning career. Cohen graduated from Princeton in 2015. Just two years later, he was one of 12 artists to join S.F. Opera’s prestigious two-year, performance-oriented Adler Fellowship Program, which is what brought him to San…
NEW RELEASE | SCOTT YANOW Sonny Lewis is a jazz legend who almost slipped away into history. A superior tenor-saxophonist and flutist based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1960s, Lewis made relatively few jazz recordings during his career. He can be heard with Smiley Winters (playing next to altoist Sonny Simmons…
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER Andrew Dodd lives nowhere near the neighborhood, but he’s brought something special to it. Dodd created the Second Sunday Concert Series at the Swedenborgian Church, at Washington and Lyon Streets, offering live music in the stunning 1895 Arts & Crafts-style church. You live in Concord. How did you get involved…