E. Doctor Smith's Blog

Marshall Crenshaw's magnificent, "Blues is King" is one of my all-time, personal favorite songs, and I can hardly believe it's been 25 years since breaking through to critical and commercial acclaim with his 1982 self-titled debut and its infectious, era-defining pop hit "Someday, Someway." Crenshaw returns with an incredible new chapter in his career with his 429 Records debut "Jaggedland", his first studio recording in more than six years is his most musically dynamic and lyrically intimate collection yet. Next Monday, April 30th, Crenshaw rolls into Yoshi's San Francisco with what promises to be another, unforgettable evening of music. "Classic Crenshaw attributes including an indelible sense of melody and tuneful essence combine to create a rich warmth and intimacy on every song of Jaggedland. The recording has a powerful vibe of immediacy thanks to Crenshaw's warm vocals and riveting guitar work. He takes the production t...

Alicia Mangan is an amazing musical anomaly; an advanced, free-style and avant-garde tenor saxophonist from Southern California. In high-school, she won state-wide acclaim in classical competitions on alto saxophone. Later, she even played baritone with a Mexican band in SoCal, and traveled with them as far as Australia on tour. In the late '90s she found her true love on tenor sax and broke new ground in the creative sounds of free improv and creative music while living in the Bay Area. Mangan is back in the Bay Area for a short visit and has gathered some of her colleagues from the time she lived and played here with Jim Ryan's "Forward Energy" group, and Marco Enedi's big bands. She's formed a quintet with Ryan that will play two sets at the Berkeley Arts Festival, next Monday, April 23rd, at 8:00 pm. Mangan honed her chops in bebop, classical, and Latin based music, but opted for total dedication to the calling of avant-garde jazz. Her music is influenc...

The modern world of digital music streaming has opened a Pandora's Box of issues and challenges for artists and labels, both indie and mainstream. Famed guitarist Robert Fripp (King Crimson/David Bowie/Brian Eno), and other notable musicians have been litigating against companies like Grooveshark , for using their music without permission and or adequate compensation. Spotify, one of the newest and biggest companies to offer online streaming, has also come under scrutiny for the amount of monies actually paid to their artists. Anil Prasad, one the most respected music journalists in his field and author of the critically acclaimed book, Innerviews , (a culmination of some of his fantastic interviews with many of the world's best musicians), recently flew to New Zealand to present the keynote address for the "2012 Sounds Aotearoa Music Expo", on the pros and cons of streaming. It was an informative presentation that gave the viewer an impressive overview of where we...

San Francisco's "Conspiracy of Beards is a 30-member a capella male choir which performs exclusively the songs of the legendary poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Inspired by the late performing artist Peter Kadyk and directed by Daryl Henline, the group performs gritty, uplifting renditions Cohen's songs." This Saturday, April 7th, the Beards, and special musical guests Peter Whitehead and Hazy Loper, perform at the SF Buddhist Center in a benefit for Jai Bhim International educational projects in India. The Beards' website bio revealed that "since its foundation in 2003, the choir has performed to dozens of enthusiastic audiences around the San Francisco Bay Area. Notable performances include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco City Hall and the Great American Music Hall, as well as appearances on PBS television station KQED, radio stations KFOG and KPFA, and national radio program West Coast Live. The group became an off...

For their first "instrumentation-themed evenings" of 2012, the ROOM Series puts "three entities of the low-end reed persuasion in the room together", tonight at the Royce Gallery. ROVA founding member Jon Raskin, LA-based new music clarinetist Marty Walker, and the Bay Area's own bass clarinet duo Sqwonk. Later, the composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z will join them, "adding some real-time Low Reed processing and some fragments of voice and samples here and there throughout the evening, and a grand finale of Low Reeds and Vox & Circuitry to close the evening..." Since 2006, Pamela Z has been presenting an avant chambre music series called ROOM that takes place in the the Royce Gallery, an intimate performance gallery in San Francisco's North East Mission Industrial Zone (NEMIZ), where she hosts evenings featuring a variety of virtuosic, solo artists and chamber groups playing experimental music (including composed music of their own, t...

Coming up on April 7th, The Jazz School in Berkeley will host "A collective trio", featuring alto saxophonist Jacob Zimmerman, bassist Kim Cass, and drummer Sam Ospovat, otherwise known as "Anteater". Over the past two years the group has developed a unique, cold-blooded and loose approach to a diverse repertoire of rhythmically complex original music. This concert celebrates the release of Anteater’s self-titled debut album, which is scheduled to be included as part of NASA’s KEO space time-capsule project. Originally from Seattle, alto saxophonist and composer Zimmerman is an active member of the thriving Bay Area creative-music community. Zimmerman studied music at the renowned Garfield High School in Seattle, the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and Mills College in Oakland. His teachers have included Roscoe Mitchell, Jerry Bergonzi, Joe Morris, Anthony Coleman, James Fei and Allan Chase. In addition to giving local performances with his own groups (...

The Jazz Heritage Center (JHC) will host the first exhibit selected from the book Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club (Indiana University Press) by photographer and writer Kathy Sloane. The exhibit will launch with an opening reception on March 17 from 4-6 PM in JHC's Koret Heritage Lobby, 1330 Fillmore Street in the Yoshi's building. The exhibit will run through April 29. Books will be available for purchase and signing at the opening reception on March 17. The photographs document the eleven-year run of San Francisco's historically significant jazz spot, which ran from 1972 to 1983. At a time when jazz venues were closing under the onslaught of rock and roll and disco, Keystone Korner was one of the few clubs nationally that survived and brought some of the greatest jazz musicians of all times to San Francisco. City Lights Books launched this book in the Fall of 2011, to a crowd of more than 250 people, and New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center host...