News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By JASON OLAINE Artistic Director, Fillmore Jazz Festival What is the sound of jazz? And can jazz mean different things to different people, perhaps even different things to the same person? Since its birth in New Orleans near the end of the 19th century, jazz was a hybrid: a mixed-up, beautiful child of Africa, Europe,…
MIA SIMMANS, manager of the Fillmore Farmers Market since last May, is a true believer — both in farmers markets and in the music that makes the Fillmore market unique. Her cred on both scores is impeccable: For the last seven years, she’s been both a vendor and musician at several of the farmers markets…
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER Being the San Francisco Symphony’s principal timpanist is just one of the things keeping Ed Stephan busy these days. He’s also head of the percussion department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh; on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at Northwestern University in Chicago; and timpanist of…
Q & A | KIM NALLEY Jazz diva Kim Nalley and her band return as headliners at the Fillmore Jazz Festival again this year, appearing on Saturday, June 30, at 4:30 p.m. on the California Street stage. It all started for you on Fillmore Street, right? Yes. I was cleaning houses and I got a…
By JASON OLAINE Artistic Director, Fillmore Jazz Festival Throwback is a term usually used in a positive way to refer to a bygone era that conjured great memories, which is what this year’s Fillmore Jazz Festival means to conjure up — positive memories of a time when all seemed right with the world: the mid-1990s.…
Q & A | JASON OLAINE Jason Olaine returns to San Francisco to book the Fillmore Jazz Festival when he’s not booking Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. You’re throwing us back this year to the 1990s — where were you back then? Well, 1993 was really the beginning of what would be my…
Q & A | MICHAEL SCHWAB The poster for the 2018 Fillmore Jazz Festival is the fourth jazz image Michael Schwab has created for the Fillmore festival. All four now hang as banners on the street. Are you a jazz fan? Sure. I’m not an aficionado, but as a kid, back in southern Oklahoma, I…
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS The news was as mournful as the sound of taps in the distance. When word spread that widely beloved trumpeter-composer-teacher-bandleader Dave Len Scott was decamping from the Fillmore to be near his family in Arizona, there was no joy in jazzville. But it’s true. For the first time in many years,…
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER International opera singer David Cangelosi has been subletting an apartment in the neighborhood since April, when he began rehearsals with San Francisco Opera for Richard Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle: four operas over three evenings and one afternoon each week for three weeks. Cangelosi, a tenor, sings in the first opera,…
By ANTHONY TORRES Years ago, when I first came to San Francisco, a friend took me to see live jazz at Rasselas, located at that time on the corner of Divisadero and California. That night, Robert Stewart played some incredibly hard R&B-inflected jazz that was incendiary. In 1999, Rasselas moved to 1534 Fillmore Street, creating…