For the casual music fan, the transition at SFJAZZ from the organization’s founder, Randall Kline, to trumpeter Terence Blanchard has been a seamless affair.
Week by week, the roster of artists performing in the SFJAZZ Center’s 700-seat Miner Auditorium and intimate 107-seat Joe Henderson Lab looks much the same in 2025 as it did in 2023. At least, that was the case until the organization unveiled the radically reimagined San Francisco Jazz Festival (SFJF), an event long overdue for conceptual update.
Running Friday-Sunday, June 13-15, the SFJF is now a proper buzz-generating festival, featuring some three-dozen concerts across multiple stages at the SFJAZZ Center and the Festival Tent covering an adjacent parking lot at Franklin and Oak. With DJs, food, wine and beer vendors, and art and vinyl merchants ensconced at each venue, the festival offers an array of access options, including limited full-access VIP and three-day passes, single-day passes and venue specific passes.
Showcasing a bevy of top improvisers, from venerable NEA jazz masters and mid-career virtuosos to under-the-radar stalwarts and rising stars, the lineup bristles with talent, including many artists who’ve never previously performed at the SFJAZZ Center.
“We’re trying to offer a variety of artists, but all very much rooted in jazz,” said Burkhard Hopper, who took over as Blanchard’s right-hand man last fall, serving as SFJAZZ’s director of artistic programming. “These days, a lot of festivals call themselves jazz, but move away from the music. It was very important for this festival to be identifiably ‘jazz.’”
Almost as important, the SFJF is now identifiably a goddam festival. For more than a decade after SFJAZZ opened the nation’s first and only stand-alone concert hall constructed with jazz in mind, it continued to produce a “festival” built on a model developed when it was an itinerant presenter without a venue to call home.
Kline founded the organization in 1983 as Jazz In The City, a concert series that focused on jazz masters living in the Bay Area, particularly tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, drummer Tony Williams, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, conguero Francisco Aguabella, vocalist Mary Stallings and percussionist John Santos (sadly, only the latter two are still with us).
By 1992, the rapidly growing organization adopted a new moniker and consolidated its concerts and educational programming as the three-week San Francisco Jazz Festival as part of the milestone 10th season. Presenting in theaters and clubs around the city, the festival was a moveable feast, with the action concentrated on the weekends. But it was always more of a concert series than an overlapping, cornucopian multi-act event, a la the Monterey Jazz Festival or San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest.
Now SFJAZZ has joined the party with its own particular vision. Each day of the festival is headlined by artists who define the 21st century scene, while building on hugely consequential contributions from the 20th century, starting with tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd.
Friday’s program also includes newly ascendant alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and the Phoenix Quartet, Grammy Award-winning vocalist Kurt Elling with the SFJAZZ Collective, and bassist Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble (the longtime head of storied Blue Note Records, Was is the honoree at the annual SFJAZZ Gala June 12).
Lloyd is a savvy choice to kick off the festival, and not just because he’s still a transcendent improviser at 87. Joined by his superlative Sky Quartet with pianist Jason Moran, Peninsula-raised bassist Larry Grenadier and former SFJAZZ Collective drummer Eric Harland, Lloyd adds another thread to a vividly multi-hued garment he’s been weaving since he introduced an epochal young band at El Matador in North Beach in 1966.
His quartet with the unknown pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Jack DeJohnette caught the ear of an ambitious impresario named Bill Graham, “who invited us to play an afternoon for half an hour or so at the Fillmore, and they wouldn’t let us off the stage,” Lloyd told me in a 2007 interview.
“We were in our mid 20s, and they heard the authenticity. We were playing opposite Muddy Waters, and I had played with him and Howlin’ Wolf and those people in Memphis. I come from the blues experience, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was there,” said Lloyd. “We were invited back, and we became popular from playing at the Fillmore. I remember Jerry Garcia said that our record, Dreamweaver, was the most influential record for the Grateful Dead.”
Lloyd’s unlikely transformation into the Flower Power generation’s favorite jazz musician took place down the road at Monterey later that year when he blew away the audience at the Monterey Jazz Festival, an encounter captured on the hit Atlantic album, Forest Flower. Through the rest of the decade, Lloyd and the quartet played to huge audiences, including a groundbreaking appearance in the former Soviet Union.
Albums such as The Flowering, Charles Lloyd in Europe and Love-In garnered airplay on free-form FM radio and sold as well as records by major rock bands. A mainstay at SFJAZZ for decades, Lloyd established his relationship with the late tabla legend Zakir Hussain at a Grace Cathedral “Sacred Spaces” concert in 2001, a few weeks after Sept. 11.
Saturday’s program features the protean duo of bass star Stanley Clarke and Cuban piano master Gonzalo Rubalcaba, powerhouse vocalist Lisa Fischer, New Orleans trumpet star Nicholas Payton, the Soul Rebels and pianist Jahari Stampley’s Trio. The festival closes Sunday with headliner Patrice Rushen, who’s making her first SFJAZZ appearance as a leader with a combustible jazz/funk combo that includes rising guitarist Enzo Iannello and veteran drummer Rayford Griffin (who has toured widely with Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty).
The program also features charismatic Cuban vocalist Cimafunk, who made a brilliant appearance with Chucho Valdés and Irakere 50 at the Paramount in February, the duo of bass great Dave Holland and Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, pianist Orrin Evans, and the duo of Berkeley trumpet star Ambrose Akinmusire and New Orleans pianist Sullivan Fortner. Blanchard, dubbed “artist-at-large,” will be roaming the festival with his horn throughout the weekend, joining in wherever he sees fit.
“That’s why he’s not playing with his own band,” Hopper said. “Terence will be sitting in with different acts. It’s a festival, and there’s supposed to be a spontaneous thing about it. We’ve also put together encounters that have never happened before, like Kurt Elling singing with the SFJAZZ Collective.”
That’s a whole lot of exciting music, and it pains me to cast a little rain on this second-line parade. But the absence of Bay Area acts on the program is too conspicuous to go unmentioned. There’s no shortage of East Bay pride in the international success of Akinmusire, but the festival doesn’t get credit for booking him despite his local address. As a trumpeter, composer and educator, he’s a global cat.
So that leaves only one act, Afrofuturist saxophonist saxophonist/composer Adris Ackamoor and the Ankhestra. He’s also an international creative force, but this is his first SFJAZZ appearance, which speaks to the long-running tensions between the organization and the local scene.
Bay Area artists who have taken SFJAZZ to task about the lack of attention have often been told that it’s a simple matter of ticket sales. It’s hard for a resident artist to fill Minor Auditorium, and even selling out two Joe Henderson Lab shows can take a lot of footwork. But at a festival where there are three or four “small print” acts each program at the bottom of the roster, with no particular pressure to bring out an audience, it seems like a major missed opportunity to present local treasures alongside out-of-town artists.
Adam Theis, the multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader and don of the Jazz Mafia collective, has forged close ties with SFJAZZ. For seven years before the pandemic, he led the Monday Night Band at the SFJAZZ Center. And when he first glanced at the SFJF program, “I was in a hurry looking at the lineup on my phone, thinking, there’s probably a page two I didn’t see, a supplemental page that’s got more the local stuff,” he said. “I was wrong, I guess.”
He’s a fan of the organization who wants to see it succeed. And he speaks for much of the local scene when he says, “We all want the Bay represented.” As an artist who has booked hundreds of shows and works closely with venues like the Sound Room in Oakland and Keys Jazz Bistro in North Beach, where Jazz Mafia combos hold down monthly residencies, Theis is intimately acquainted with the necessity of selling tickets.
“For a local artist to do a Minor show is a big push,” he said. “It’s ambitious, but it’s a tall order for a jazz artist. Then Joe Henderson Lab is too small for some groups. This would have been a nice medium, playing before some of these bigger names. It seems like a missed opportunity. But it’s the first time they’re doing it, and it was probably overlooked.”
Rather than flaming the organization, local artists will probably be better served by building bridges. After relocating from Los Angeles for the SFJAZZ position, Hopper is new to the Bay Area and still getting to know the local musical landscape. He points out that the organization continues to book many Bay Area artists in the Joe Henderson Lab, and that the plan is to expand the festival if all goes well.
“Ultimately, this first year is an experiment,” he said. “We’re going to learn a lot from this experience. We’ll use this information for the next one. There are various models on how to enlarge it. This was the conservative version. We’re looking at other venues we could use, presenting other styles and more. We’re extremely optimistic about this.”
Lord knows we need opportunities for bliss and celebration. For now, I’m holding onto the hope that next year will see more San Francisco in the San Francisco Jazz Festival.
San Francisco Jazz Festival, Fri, June 13, 2-9pm;
Sat-Sun, June 14-15, 1-10pm; SFJAZZ Center at 201 Franklin St., and Festival Tent & Outdoor Festival Street Market at 110 Franklin St., San Francisco; sfjazz.org.
