San Francisco Jazz Festival makes bold debut with expanded format, big ambitions

San Francisco Chronicle​

14-06-2025

With a New Orleans style brass band blasting out a second line over the traffic roaring down Franklin Street, the revamped San Francisco Jazz Festival introduced itself to Hayes Valley as a trial run for bigger parties to come.
Friday the 13 th isn't an auspicious date to launch a new, three-day festival, particularly when a wave of national protests coincides with the next day's programming. But SFJazz offered a glimpse of what the future might look like in the venue-rich neighborhood given a little luck and a lot of great music.
With three shows in the SFJazz Center's Robert N. Miner Auditorium, four sets in the intimate Joe Henderson Lab, and another four performances in a tent covering a parking lot on Oak Street, Friday's roster offered a successful proof of concept. The cars zooming through the intersection of Franklin and Fell streets didn't seem to faze festivalgoers, many of whom moved back and forth between the building and the nearby tent throughout the day.
Playing the opening Minor Auditorium set with the SFJazz Collective, Grammy Award-winning vocalist Kurt Elling greeted the half-filled room by welcoming 'everyone playing hooky from something.' Premiering newly minted arrangements by SFJazz Collective Music Director Chris Potter, Elling delivered a bravura program of his lyrics set to tunes by the great fusion band Weather Report. Most of the venue's seats were full by the time he concluded.
At the same time in the Joe Henderson Lab, velvet-smooth jazz crooner Sachal Vasandani performed in a stripped down trio with guitarist Charles Altura and Dayna Stephens on tenor sax and bass-line-supplying Electronic Wind Instrument. Whether interpreting Sade or his confessional originals, he offered a fascinating counterpoint to Elling's fine-grit tone and thickly orchestrated, percussion-driven charts.
Don Was, the recipient of the SFJazz Lifetime Achievement Award at the organization's gala on Thursday, June 12, led his powerhouse Pan Detroit Orchestra through a torrid set of originals and extravagantly reimagined Motor City material. He's not a flashy bassist, but he powered the ship with authority.
SFJazz Executive Artistic Director Terence Blanchard has made it clear that his vision for the festival extends far beyond the current footprint.
The festival tent on Oak Street — closed to make room for several food trucks, a merchandise table, a beer garden and a dining area — was reimagined with a different programming focus. It featured acts aimed at broader and possibly younger audiences, including a quartet led by Snarky Puppy guitarist Mark Lettieri and a hip-hop-inflected quintet led by drummer and emcee Kassa Overall.
The strategy seemed to work. Among those drawn in were 17-year-olds Keira Kennedy of Oakland and her friend Michael Norris, who said he'd never been to an SFJazz event before. Standing near the back of the festival tent during Overall's set, the two teens lit up as the drummer gave a shoutout to Bay Area legend E-40.
'It's been amazing,' said Michael, a hip-hop fan eager to check out related musical styles throughout the festival, which wraps up Sunday, June 15.
Burkhard Hopper, SFJazz's director of artistic programming, was strolling the Oak Street midway with his wife, Australian pianist and jazz vocalist Sarah McKenzie, and their toddler son. Friday's ticket sales were the lightest of the weekend, while day two might stretch the Miner Auditorium's capacity, 'particularly for the Stanley Clarke and Gonzalo Rubalcaba show,' he said.
There were a few first-day hiccups, starting with an understaffed check-in table. At 2 p.m. Friday, the line was slowly creeping along, but by mid-afternoon the bottleneck had been resolved. As the evening turned chilly, heat lamps by the dining tables would have been welcome.
Miner Auditorium was nearly full by the time tenor sax legend Charles Lloyd took the stage with his Sky Quartet, featuring pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland. Nearly six decades after his landmark 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival set, which yielded the million-selling 'Forest Flower,' Lloyd's presence felt like a benediction for the newly reimagined festival.
After dropping out of the jazz scene in the 1970s Lloyd toured with the Beach Boys and recorded in Brian Wilson 's home studio. Much as he'd beautifully evoked the spirit of his former Sangam bandmate Zakir Hussain at the SFJazz Gala the night before, he mourned the recent loss of another singular creative force by opening the set with a prayer-like rendition of 'God Only Knows.'