E. Doctor Smith's Blog

The West Coast’s largest free jazz festival returns this summer with a weekend of live music, gourmet food and local arts and crafts.  On Saturday and Sunday, July 7 & 8, the 28th Annual Fillmore Jazz Festival, on Fillmore Street between Jackson and Eddy, will showcase the Bay Area’s most talented musicians across the full spectrum of jazz music accompanied by a festival infused with the local flavors and culture of San Francisco’s historic Fillmore District. This year’s festival will feature more than two dozen bands performing on three different stages, including a heartfelt tribute to Etta James performed each afternoon on the California Street Stage by Kim Nalley, one of the Bay Area’s most acclaimed jazz and blues vocalists. Other performers on the California Street Stage include Radio Jazz, Foxtails Brigade, the Mark Rapp Group, the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, Venissa Santi, and the Michael Orenstein Group presented by The Jazzschool. The Sutter Street – Beyond Stage wil...

John Moremen is almost impossible to explain. A session-man, side-man, band leader and collaborator extraordinaire, the San Francisco musician has recorded with experimentalists Half Japanese and MX-80, backed legendary Flamin' Groovies front man Roy Loney, written with The Minus Five's Scott McCaughey and fronted his own bands. And that's alongside over a decade as a member of Bay Area popsters, The Orange Peels, first as their drummer and now as their lead guitarist. Yet none of that explains what he does on "Flotation Device," where he navigates surf, NRBQ-esque roots rock and Monk-like bop with a deft hand. In the spring of 2011, Moremen started working on some instrumentals for fun, but over the course of a few months found himself completing over 20 songs. After each one was finished, Moremen would post them online as a work in progress. "I was kind of going back to something I did when I was in my teens, where I would come up with these instrumentals a...