.Music

Lark in the Morning is a Berkeley store featuring over 1,500 instruments from around the world, many of which are handmade by craftspeople, and is owned by Eric Azumi, a musician and businessperson who bought the store to fulfill his passion for music.

Manning Music bills itself as a community of teachers and musicians who love bluegrass, old-time, fiddle and acoustic music. At present, the Berkeley-based school has nine teachers: Robin Fischer, Rowan McCallister, Leah Wollenberg, Yoseff Tucker, Arvram Siegel,...

Alexis Harte said his latest song, “Your Rose Garden,” was inspired by an evening he spent in Berkeley’s Rose Garden. “I grew up in Berkeley and started playing guitar when I was 14,” he said. “The Rose...

Alphabet Rockers is a community-based children’s music project helmed by Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd. With the help of a group of collaborators—some of them as young as nine years old—they write, produce and record songs that...

Naima Shalhoub’s first album of original material, Siphr, covers a lot of emotional, geographical and musical ground. It plays like a suite and includes arrangements that draw on Middle Eastern and American modes. It also includes her reinvention of “Lamma Bada Yatathanna,” a song from Moorish Spain that’s more than 1,000 years old. The music was recorded in San Francisco, but Shalhoub said the idea behind it began brewing a few years before, during a trip to Lebanon, her parents’ birthplace.

The album has a larger-than-life sound, with bedrock rhythms complimented by washes of steel guitar and reverberating electric guitars that take up an immense sonic space.

By turns comic and camp, heart-rending, occasionally chiding and ultimately a nuanced, clear-eyed expression of what it means to be a trans artist and person of color in this cultural moment, In Mirrors has all the earmarks of a creative milestone—an achievement that is both now and timeless. Its latest manifestation is In Mirrors, a new EP from her band Pretty Frankenstein, now out on Spotify and Bandcamp.