Nina Menendez, flamenco ‘powerhouse' and Bay Area festival founder, dies at 69

San Francisco Chronicle​

14 hours ago

Armed with a doctorate in Spanish from Stanford in the early 1990s, Nina Menendez embarked on the usual academic career but soon pivoted to a very different path: She became a flamenco singer and founder of Bay Area Flamenco.
Performances were held in spaces as large as Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus and as small as Menendez's own backyard in Oakland. Her main event, the Bay Area Flamenco Festival, included lectures, workshops, voice and guitar lessons and lasted for 15 years until the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.
Then, despite a colon cancer diagnosis, Menendez had enough energy and enthusiasm for a second project: promoting the legacy of her mother, the singer and activist Barbara Dane.
Dane had been a minor star in the 1950s and '60s, singing folk with Bob Dylan at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village and blues with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon at the Gate of Horn in Chicago. She performed protest songs with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez in Central Park, and even sang with Louis Armstrong on the 'Timex All Star Jazz Show.'
Menendez became executive producer of the documentary film 'The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane,' in-house editor of her mother's autobiography 'This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song,' and director of the Barbara Dane Legacy Project, which produced a six-concert tour and subsequent two-CD set titled 'Hot Jazz, Cool blues and Hardhitting Songs,' issued by Smithsonian Folkways.
Dane died last October at age 97. Menendez outlasted her mother by 10 months. She died at her home in Oakland on Aug. 5, said her brother, Pablo Menendez, a rock 'n' roll bandleader who lives in Havana. Menendez had spent five years 'winning the war against cancer,' he said, before finally losing it. She was 69.
'Nina Menendez was a very private, very funny, very intelligent producer, who got things done,' said her half brother Jesse Cahn, an Oklahoma City singer-songwriter, open-mic nightclub host and member of the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame. 'She developed an affinity and love for flamenco and Spanish gypsy culture early in life, and became an accomplished singer. She was not just some West Coast chick who was cool. She was immersed in the culture and acted as a critical bridge between the flamenco communities in Spain and in the Bay Area.'
She was also immersed in the leftist culture of Berkeley, under the influence of her mother, a dedicated Communist who would always come to a rally and sing for the cause. During Menendez's childhood, she moved with her mother and brothers wherever the performance and recording work took Dane, but Berkeley was a constant.
'Wherever else we were living, Berkeley and Oakland were always home,' said Pablo. 'My mom tried as much as possible trying to give us a taste of her life of culture and music. I remember when I was 10 and Nina was 7, going to the Blackhawk to meet Dizzy Gillespie.'
Dane supported the family by commuting to San Francisco to sing at Turk Murphy's Easy Street and the Jazz Workshop. For a time, she had a TV show, and for a time, Dane ran her own joint in North Beach, called Sugar Hill: Home of the Blues. She was the nightly headliner while her second husband, Byron Menendez, father of Pablo and Nina, ran the front of the house.
The Barbara Danes story drips with 50s and 60s culture, all detailed in the book 'This Bell Still Rings,' published by Heyday in Berkeley. The cover shows Menendez clinging to her mother's side, at age 9, at an anti-Vietnam War rally in San Francisco. Another photo shows her at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963, and yet another at an antiwar rally in New York City in 1965. It was a three-way process between Dane, Menendez and publisher Steve Wasserman to whittle the 800-page manuscript down to 400 pages by the time of its publication in 2022. Wasserman described Menendez as 'first reader, foil and helmswoman' of the project.
'Nina was even more crucial on the marketing and publicity,' he said. 'She was a demon networker and warrior on Barbara Dane's behalf.'
Nina Menendez was born on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, 1955. While visibly pregnant, her mother was singing in a Berkeley joint called the Lark's Club, backed by a jazz band called Bob Mielke's Bearcats. There was commotion on stage when the neck broke off the standup bass, and the crowd thought it was because Nina was born right then and there.
Menedez's father ran a retail shop featuring hand-wrought originals called Byron's Jewelry on the ground floor of their home in Berkeley. But after her parents divorced in 1963, Nina was pulled from Berkeley schools to move with her mother to Brooklyn, where she was put in a public school classroom populated by Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans, according to Cahn.
'We were all more or less abandoned by our mother at about 13 years old,' said her half brother, whose father was Dane's first husband Rolf Cahn. 'Nina emerged from this period intact and came back to Berkeley as a hippie chick. By 14, she was one of the kids who was part of the infamous Telegraph Avenue scene.'
She attended Berkeley High School and her scene evolved into the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which provided her introduction to flamenco when she joined a troupe that performed it. 'There were parties till 4 or 5 in the morning every night,' said Cahn, who also was involved. 'They'd play flamenco music all night and Nina learned to sing and to do fiesta dancing.'
From there, she cobbled together an undergraduate education that included Cabrillo College in Aptos, the University of Havana in Cuba, and Stanford, where she earned both her M.A. and her Ph.D in Spanish, in 1993. Her dissertation was titled 'No Woman is an Island: Cuban Women's Fiction in the 1920s and '30s.' Menendez was hired to teach at the University of Florida, but lasted only a few years.
'She was disenchanted with academia. She didn't like the competitiveness of it,' said Cahn, 'so she came back to live at our mother's house and naturally migrated into production, which led to her becoming a powerhouse in the flamenco scene in the Bay Area.'
In 2004, she formed Bay Area Flamenco Partnerships, which evolved into the Bay Area Flamenco Festival/Festival Flamenco Gitano, which she produced. She would make radio appearances and introduce artists, always giving historical context to the music.
'She was always promoting the other musicians, and then she would do cameos at fiestas,' said Maureen Gosling, director of 'The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane' documentary, who often saw Menendez sing in Oakland restaurants and other small venues, including her backyard parties.
'You could tell that she was part of that community, not an outsider wannabe,' said Gosling. 'She was extremely expressive and passionate when she sang and she always dressed with a unique and stunning flair.'
The Bay Area Flamenco Festival started in 2005 and drew annual audiences of more than 3,000 to venues on both sides of the bay. There were artist residencies, films and lectures, all put together by a core group of volunteers dedicated to the art form. It peaked in 2019 with an ambitious program to celebrate '100 Years of Flamenco in the Bay Area.'
The concert, featuring Bay Area-based musical and dance groups rather than the usual Spanish performers, was held at Cowell Theater in Fort Mason in San Francisco. Menendez, who wore a flower in her hair and traditional Spanish dress, served as emcee, as always.
'This was a dream of Nina's, to bring together a production of all the Bay Area flamenco artists, for one night,' said Kay Marie Jacobson, the operations manager. 'The place was packed and it was a beautiful event.'
The 2020 Bay Area Flamenco Festival was canceled due to COVID-19. After that, the spirit was kept alive through summer fiestas and artist residencies in Menendez's backyard, where she would still sing as recently as the summer of 2024.
Her mother died that October, and the memorial service was held at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley in May.
Menendez was in and out of the hospital during this time, but she made sure to be at her mother's memorial and that there was a table with free copies of 'This Bell Still Rings.'
'She just willed herself into doing a wonderful memorial for our mother,' said Pablo. She also willed herself to the memorial he put on 15 days later at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, he said — and all this after enduring surgery for a brain tumor.
By then she was in a wheelchair, but Pablo expected his sister to also will herself to her 70th birthday, which would have been this coming December.
According to Jacobson, Menendez was vibrant as ever, producing the memorial show and introducing the speakers and musical guests with the same passion she brought to her emcee work at the Bay Area Flamenco Festival.
'Flamenco is not just music and dance,' said Jacobson. 'It is a way of life that deeply respects tradition and embraces collaboration and community — and Nina lived it.'