How the revamped San Francisco Jazz Festival aims to rival New Orleans' Jazz Fest
'Look where I'm from, bro,' the New Orleans native told the Chronicle. 'I just played Jazz Fest, and one thing I've always loved about it is that I see people from around the world coming to New Orleans. The city comes alive. The entire area is lit up. San Francisco deserves that.'
To that end — albeit on a much smaller scale — San Francisco is getting a shot of Crescent City mojo with a revamped event that packs all of the action into one weekend, a major shift from its former concert-series format. Running Friday, June 13, through Sunday, June 15, San Francisco Jazz Festival features some three-dozen performances across multiple stages at SFJazz Center and an adjacent tent covering the parking lot at Franklin and Oak streets.
The sheer density of programming offers an immersive festival experience in the heart of Civic Center. In the two decades before the jazz center opened in 2013, the SFJazz organization was known as the San Francisco Jazz Festival and its flagship three-week fall concert series presented shows at venues around the city, with no real center of gravity.
Once SFJazz built its own facility at 201 Franklin St., the festival became a vestige of its origins and largely blended into its year-round calendar. Now, Blanchard sees the reimagined San Francisco Jazz Festival as the spearhead of a major expansion.
While starting with 'a trial run' of a single weekend, he 'envisions this thing becoming a two-week festival where we engage the whole Civic Center,' Blanchard said. 'We have a whole bunch of ideas.'
With Oak Street closed for a block between Franklin Street and Van Ness Avenue, there's a free-access midway that will feature DJs, wine and beer vendors, Off the Grid food trucks, and art and vinyl merchants.
Then there's its eye-catching lineup, a multigenerational musical roster that encompasses mid-career virtuosos including pianist Orrin Evans, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin; and rising stars like pianist Jahari Stampley, trumpeter Tatiana Tate and vocalist Tyreek McDole.
Los Angeles pianist/keyboardist Patrice Rushen, a force in jazz, R&B and pop since the early 1970s, is also making her SFJazz debut as a bandleader, headlining Sunday's program. Meanwhile, hip-hop steeped drummer and DJ Kassa Overall and trumpet star Theo Croker, a pillar of programming at the Tenderloin jazz club Black Cat, are artists geared to connect with both jazz heads and younger jazz-adjacent audiences.
But SFJazz isn't just embracing diverse new styles — it's also honoring its roots. Revered veterans saxophonist Charles Lloyd and bassists Stanley Clarke and Dave Holland (all National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters) are featured on the bill and speaks to the institution's commitment to its titular tradition.
As for Blanchard, the acclaimed trumpeter himself is providing the festival's secret sauce as 'artist at large,' roaming the various stages to sit in with different acts.
'He's not playing with his own band, so he's got the freedom to run around with his trumpet,' said Burkhard Hopper, who came on as SFJazz's director of artistic programming last October. 'A festival is supposed to have a spontaneous element.'
Working closely with the German-born Hopper, a veteran music agent and concert producer who spent years bringing American jazz artists to Europe, Blanchard is looking to extend the organization's reach far beyond the city. As part of that effort, SFJazz is partnering with San Jose Jazz this summer for the first time, taking over the Montgomery Theater for the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest from Aug. 8-10. It also plans to present a concert series at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek this fall.
But first things first, and that's the upcoming festival — which has one notable omission from this trial run: Bay Area jazz artists. Aside from Berkeley trumpet star Ambrose Akinmusire, who's performing duo with the superlative New Orleans pianist Sullivan Fortner, and San Francisco Afro-futurist Idris Ackamoor and Ankhestra, the program is dominated by out-of-town acts.
Blanchard, however, urges patience, noting that SFJazz presents local artists year-round. 'The New Orleans Jazz Fest got the same reaction,' he said about complaints from resident artists.
'I'm trying to build an international jazz festival, not disregarding local artists,' he went on. 'We want to build something that people come to from all over, and we need international artists that people recognize. When we get that going, we'll have other stages where more local artists play, but we don't have that yet.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Mark Hamill says he almost left U.S. after Trump win. Then his wife pulled a Jedi mind trick
' Star Wars ' actor Mark Hamill says he was planning to move to Europe after Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president — until his wife made him reconsider. The Oakland native, who shot to fame as Luke Skywalker, has been an outspoken liberal for decades, and told the Times of London that after Trump defeated incumbent Joe Biden in November 2024, he gave his wife Marilou York the choice of moving with him to Ireland or London. 'She's very clever,' Hamill said in the interview posted Saturday, Aug. 16. 'She didn't respond right away but a week later she said, 'I'm surprised you would allow him to force you out of your own country.'' Hamill suddenly realized his wife of 47 years was right. ''That son of a bitch,' I thought,' Hamill said of Trump. ''I'm not leaving.'' Other celebrities, such as Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres, have left America after Trump's victory. But Hamill is staying despite his deep disdain for the president. 'The bullying, the incompetence, the people in place,' Hamill said of Trump. 'The only way I can deal with it without going crazy and wanting to open my veins in a warm tub is to look at it like a thick, sprawling political novel. It's entertaining in a way because this could actually be the end. 'Our status in the world has been crippled and that will reverberate for decades. Making Canada a 51st state? Do you know how offensive that is? And then taking over Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. The distractions are hilarious.' The Hamills would seem to have had an extra incentive to leave the U.S. after the Malibu neighborhood that contains their longtime home was ravaged by the Los Angeles County wildfires in January. Hamill told the Chronicle in June that while their home survived, it is uninhabitable because of the condition of the neighborhood. They are renting a house until they are able to return to their home. Hamill told the Chronicle he considers the Bay Area his spiritual home. His father was a U.S. Navy captain stationed in the Bay Area when he was born, and still has family here, including his older brother William, a psychiatrist. The Hamills' second son, Griffin, was born in San Francisco in 1983 when Mark Hamill was performing onstage in Peter Shaffer's 'Amadeus.'
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Aubrey Plaza shares grief over husband's death with Amy Poehler
Actress Aubrey Plaza told her 'Parks and Recreation' co-star Amy Poehler that she likens grief to a horror movie as she tries to process the suicide of her husband. Plaza, the Marin County resident who is co-starring in Joel Coen's new neo-noir 'Honey Don't! ,' appeared on Poehler's 'Good Hang' podcast, which posted Tuesday, Aug. 19. The host immediately addressed the death of Plaza's husband, Jeff Baena. 'I think I would, on behalf of all the people who feel like they know you and the people who do know you: How are you feeling today,' Poehler asked. Plaza thought for a moment before responding. 'I mean, right in this very, very present moment, I feel happy to be with you,' Plaza said. 'I feel overall, I'm here and I'm functioning, and I feel, you know, like I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I think I'm OK, but, you know, it's like a daily struggle.' The body of Baena, a screenwriter and director, was found at his Los Angeles home on Jan. 3. The medical examiner's report cited the cause of death as suicide. He was 47. Plaza and Baena first met in 2011 and quietly wed in 2021. The actress starred in Baena's 2014 directorial debut, the zombie comedy 'Life After Beth.' She also appeared in his medieval comedy 'The Little Hours' (2017), which Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle called one of the year's funniest films, and 'Spin Me Round' (2022). At the time of Baena's death, the couple had been separated for several months. On the podcast, Plaza compared her grief to the plot of 'The Gorge,' an Apple TV+ science fiction horror movie starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy released in February. 'In the movie, there's a cliff on one side and then there's a cliff on the other side and then there is a gorge in between and it's filled with all these monster people that are trying to get them and I swear when I watched it I was like, 'That feels like what my grief is like,' where it's like a giant ocean of just awfulness that's right there and I can see it and sometimes I just want to dive into it and be in it. And then sometimes I just look at it. And then, sometimes, I try to get away from it, but it's always there. It's just always there, and the monster people are trying to get me like Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.' Days after Baena's death, Plaza and Baena's family released a statement asking for privacy. 'This is an unimaginable tragedy. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has offered support,' Plaza and the Baena and Stern families said in a statement on Jan. 6, shortly after his death was ruled a suicide. 'Please respect our privacy during this time.' Beyond that, Plaza has largely remained out of the public eye. She paid tribute to Baena during a brief appearance on NBC's ' SNL50: The Anniversary Special ' in February by wearing a tie-dyed shirt (a hobby of Baena's), and appeared on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in May at the world premiere of 'Honey Don't!'
San Francisco Chronicle
3 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
In ‘Where Are You Really From,' Elaine Hsieh Chou stretches herself outside of satire
Elaine Hsieh Chou loves to write messy, imperfect characters. That's clear to anyone who read her 2022 debut novel, 'Disorientation,' a biting satire about academia, Asian fetishism and the many missteps people take when presenting themselves to the world. For her second book, an edgy story collection called 'Where Are You Really From,' Chou goes one step further in showing readers her range through complex characters in scenarios that cross the lines of genre. In one story that blends elements of science fiction and horror, a sex tourist visits the Hong Kong of the future and finds himself testing the bounds of virtual reality. In another, a mail-order bride is quite literally shipped to the United States, packing peanuts and all, to skirt an immigration ban. 'People just tend to think of you as a writer based on your debut novel, so I was just called a satirist' after the publication of 'Disorientation,' she told the Chronicle in a recent interview. 'But the whole time, I was writing all these other stories in different genres that feed into the same concerns and obsessions.' The result is a collection that surprises readers at every turn of the page. Chou, who grew up partly in the East Bay, draws readers into a diverse array of settings, from the normalcy of the California suburbs to an off-kilter version of Paris that offers a glimpse into an alternate reality. As a writer, Chou makes it clear that she was never solely a satirist. After working concurrently on both manuscripts during her graduate studies at New York University, she sold both books together to Penguin Press in 2020. 'It was a gift to be able to read 'Where Are You Really From' on the heels of 'Disorientation' for the first time,' Chou's editor, Casey Denis, told the Chronicle. 'In this collection, she pushes humor, surrealism, anger and confusion all the way to the edge.' While Denis acquired both books five years ago, 'Where Are You Really From' seems to meet the present in 2025 to an almost uncanny degree with its interest in futuristic themes and its handling of political subjects like immigration and xenophobia. 'The reason her fiction will always meet the moment in this way is because she stretches it just past what's comfortable,' Denis said. 'She's looking behind the walls, and she has an eye on what's coming. She isn't hiding or shrouding reality in any way, which makes it so brave.' Chou said that when putting her second book together, she knew her stories weren't centered around a particular theme or subject. 'I made a lot of cuts and wrote new stories while asking myself what would cohere and make sense for the collection,' she said. 'Ultimately, so much of these stories are about someone's version of the truth based on their own hangups, fears and desires butting up against someone else's perspective of what happened.' For example, well into the sex tourist story, 'Happy Endings,' Chou offers a critical perspective shift from the male client (who, laughably, considers himself morally upright) to the woman who is operating the VR technology in use: 'Some might call her actions a form of revenge, but Eden prefers the word consequence,' she writes. ''Revenge' is amateurish, melodramatic in its very conception, whereas her actions are no different from cleaning up a spill, ironing out a wrinkle, righting a book that's tipped over.' Examining differing perspectives and perceptions of others has been a preoccupation in Chou's work for decades, said one of the author's earliest creative writing instructors, Kim O'Neil. The author of 'Fever Dogs,' O'Neil first encountered Chou as one of her undergraduate students at UC Irvine. 'From the first story I read of hers through today, there's an astuteness and sensitivity she has to complications and how people self-present in the world,' O'Neil said. Now a senior lecturer at University of Illinois Chicago, O'Neil said that she's excited to teach Chou's collection to her students, who are interested in cross-over genres like feminist horror and speculative fiction that surface in 'Where Are You Really From.' Meanwhile, Chou is continuing to push the boundaries of her craft as a storyteller, expanding into the world of screenwriting, which she began teaching herself after turning in her first book. 'And when the writing is good, you're in a trance state. That's when the characters come alive on their own.'
