For the SF WEEKLY: For 30 years, the nonprofit organization now known as SFJAZZ has curated the San Francisco Jazz Festival, an annual showcase of live performances by well-known artists, more obscure ones, and local acts at venues throughout the city over the course of multiple weeks. This year’s festival, from June 12 to June [...]
For the ECONOMIST: TALK about the music industry these days is fairly grim. More people may be listening to more music than ever before, but no one seems to know how to make money out of the business. So what can be done about it? This was the question before the entrepreneurs and developers who [...]
The new SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, a swank 700-seat concert hall with stadium seating and tall ceilings, begs the question: is it more important that live jazz be intimate or sound good? The San Francisco nonprofit group SFJAZZ, which has been hosting jazz events at various venues in the city since the 80s, and [...]
For the SF WEEKLY: Electronic dance music, when paired with live instrumentation, can have disastrous results: a tenor sax player, wearing Tevas, soloing endlessly over a pre-programmed keyboard pattern; a live drummer struggling to stay in sync with looped beats; a confused audience. But joined onstage at the Warfield on Friday by brass, woodwinds, string [...]
For the SF WEEKLY: Electronic dance music shows often have a similar vibe: A DJ on a stage above a large dancefloor or tucked away in a small booth you can’t quite see. A sea of head-bobbing, dancing fans. Flashing lights, high volume, heavy bass, even heavier beats. Depending on your personality, such an experience [...]
What expectations do audience members have for opening bands? How do expectations change for the headline band? Been thinking recently about the roles of both, after attending recent shows featuring the Mike Dillon Band, Marco Benevento, Afrolicious, and the Budos Band.
For the THE ECONOMIST: IT IS not difficult to understand why South Africa’s restless youth in the 1980s may have been drawn to punk music. A young, liberal generation, looking to rebel against apartheid, was empowered by the anti-establishment lyrics and up-tempo, aggressive rhythms of the popular British and American punk groups, and inspired to [...]
For the ECONOMIST: A STREAK of semi-dried blood runs across an Iraqi boy’s face. A father and his three sons guard their Kadhamiya neighbourhood from looters. Children in a Shiite religious learning centre re-enact scenes they witnessed during battle between American soldiers and the Mahdi army. These and many other scenes of Iraqis were captured [...]
For the ECONOMIST: KEHINDE WILEY, an African-American artist, has gained attention for his vibrant, large-scale paintings that appear to mix urban hip-hop imagery with old-master portraiture. His subjects tend to be young black men in hoodies and jeans, who strike the confident poses of kings and aristocratic dandies against bright and ornate wallpaper-like backdrops. For [...]
For the ECONOMIST: PETRA HADEN, an American musician, has earned attention for her sweet and somewhat cheeky a cappella covers of classic pop songs by The Who and Michael Jackson. By layering tracks of her vocal recordings, she is able to recreate the instrumentation on hits such as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”. In 2005 she [...]
