News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By Jesse Hamlin A sea of sun-drenched people flowed along Fillmore Street on Saturday, partaking of the musical and gustatory pleasures — not to mention the beer, wine and margaritas — served up by San Francisco’s biggest street bash. Blues and barbecued oysters. Fried catfish and Nigerian folk songs. Those were some of the sounds…
For the 27th time, Fillmore Street will celebrate the Fourth of July by hosting the Fillmore Jazz Festival, this year on July 2 and 3. It’s by far the largest street party in the city, stretching from Jackson Street in Pacific Heights south through the Fillmore Jazz District to Eddy Street. Ruth Dewson, the long-reigning…
After more than a year of exploring the possibilities, the San Francisco Film Society is coming to the neighborhood — but to Japantown, not the Clay Theater. The Film Society announced this morning that it will establish a year-round home and take over the programming of the stylish and high-tech Viz Cinema at the New…
Globetrotting jazz vocalist Kitty Margolis returns to Fillmore — source of some of her earliest musical inspiration — for her debut performance at Yoshi’s on June 24. “When I was a kid, barely 12 years old,” says the fourth generation San Franciscan, “I would go to the Fillmore and Winterland and see all sorts of…
By Barbara Kate Repa Yoga. Trance dancing. Nurturing food from the earth. Music by the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart. A crowd of true believers at the Fillmore. It sounds like the ’60s all over again. But this time, in a wholly wholesome good way, it’s a unique happening called Wanderlust coming to the historic Fillmore…
MUSIC | Anthony Torres I first heard Charles Unger play when I stepped into the Sheba Piano Lounge on the way home from Yoshi’s one night. As I walked in, I was immediately struck by the intonation of the tenor sax and the ease with which Unger and his band, The Experience, moved through Carlos…
Hollywood is in the neighborhood and they’re going to church — the Swedenborgian Church at Washington and Lyon. It snowed on the little church this week — or appeared to — when Nicole Kidman was filming scenes for Hemingway & Gelhorn, a new HBO film directed by Philip Kaufman, who lives just over the hill.…
In what locals are taking as a hopeful sign — quite literally — the historic neon marquee at the Clay Theater is lighted once again. It has been dark and broken for months, a tangible nightly reminder of the theater’s uncertain future. Now that the lights are back on — and Catherine Deneuve is back…
San Francisco trumpeter Allen Smith, who died February 3 after a long illness, will be remembered and celebrated by many of the top jazz musicians in the Bay Area at a “Musician’s Tribute to Allen Smith.” It will be held at Yoshi’s at 1330 Fillmore on Sunday, April 10, from 2 to 4 p.m. There…
Many in the music world are still scratching their heads about the Grammy Award for Best New Artist that went to bass player Esperanza Spalding Sunday night. But not jazz fans in the Fillmore, who know her from her performances at Yoshi’s. EARLIER: At Yoshi’s, beauty and the bass