By Richard Scheinin
POSTED: 11/29/2013 08:14:59 AM PST | UPDATED: 3 DAYS AGO
Photo: (Josie Lepe/Bay Area News Group)
Ancient history, right?
Not according to Max Borkenhagen, the 24-year-old artistic director at San Jose's Cafe Stritch, a downtown room with a long shiny bar and seating for 150. Jazz is edgy and alive, he says, and he wants people to experience "that feeling that what you're hearing is bigger than you and bigger than life. And my biggest dream is to make that feeling happen for as many people as possible as often as possible."
In the digital age, live music struggles in every genre. Yet the Bay Area's jazz scene offers more choices these days than any one fanatic can handle. Feisty venues keep popping up, from Cafe Stritch, where "Saturday Night Live" Band trombonist Steve Turre recently held forth, to Duende, a cool little loft space in Oakland's Uptown district, whose co-owners (one of them an award-winning chef) happen to be cutting-edge jazz fanatics.
Clubs are "where the music was born, and that's where it lived for decades and that's where it feels the best," says drummer Scott Amendola, who lives in Berkeley and helps book the acts at Duende. He calls it "a place where you get to bring your music to the people."
Factor in this year's opening of the $65 million SFJazz Center, a concert hall/club hybrid that's made national headlines, and the case is made once again for the Bay Area as a national jazz mecca, the busiest outside New York.
"This appears to be a high-water time for jazz" here, says Randall Klin e, founder of SFJazz, which will bring stars including Wynton Marsalis and Wayne Shorter to the center for four-night runs in the spring. "I've done this long enough to see the ebbs and flows, but it feels like the energy is in these places right now. And if the people keep showing up, that's like the greatest story going."
If you know where to look -- in clubs, restaurants and bars, not to mention libraries, art galleries and the big-ticket bookings of major performing arts organizations -- every night offers fresh prospects.
A few examples: Latin jazz powerhouse Eddie Palmieri performs at the SFJazz Center this weekend, and, in coming days, one can hear pianist Glen Pearson (a gem of the Bay Area scene) at Oakland's 57th Street Gallery, as well as the guitar-drums duo of Charlie Hunter and Amendola at cozy Dana Street Roasting Company in Mountain View. Head south to Santa Cruz's Kuumbwa Jazz Center to witness hard-bop drum legend Louis Hayes and his Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band, which also will play at Yoshi's in Oakland. Nearby, sample the electronica-jazz of Kandinsky Effect at Duende.
Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/music/ci_24623674/jazz-mecca-returning-bay-area.html
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