Rock and the "San Francisco sound
Nothing is more typical of San Francisco and the Bay Area than rock music. In the midst of the counter-cultural turmoil of the 1960s, full of hope and commitment, a wave of new bands embodied the values and ideas of this youthful movement in music. Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana and Jefferson Airplane, to name only the most famous, embodied this psychedelic and feverish aesthetic that culminated in the mythical Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. The Fillmore (Pacific Heights) was a major contributor to the sound
, hosting all of its actors in the 1960s. Anyone who is in the mood for a pilgrimage will be delighted to learn that the venue still exists. Better still, it is still one of the best concert halls in San Francisco and the headliners (mostly rock and indie) that come to town perform there regularly.With this history, San Francisco is still a rock city. A little less psychedelic - but it still runs in its veins - a little more garage and abrasive, the local rock scene has carried and continues to carry stars of the genre who tour the world. Starting with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, soaring and hallucinated rock led by Anton Newcombe (a character) and followed by excellent bands, each more talented than the other: Ty Segall and Oh Sees (previously Thee Oh Sees), the two champions, but also Wooden Shjips, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Kelley Stoltz, The Mantles, The Fresh & Onlys and The Sandwitches. Not quite rock but well inscribed in the heritage of "sound", let's also mention the fabulous (the word is weak) Natalie Mering and her project Weyes Blood, psychedelic and baroque pop, a phenomenon of finesse and beauty.
Apart from the Fillmore, there are a considerable number of venues where you can see a rock concert in San Francisco. The best ones are without hesitation The Bottom Of The Hill, a must for indie fans and a very popular venue for San Franciscans that it would be a shame to miss, as well as the Great American Music Hall, a 1907 cabaret, a former brothel converted into a concert hall that has hosted all the big names, from Van Morrison to the Grateful Dead via Duke Ellington. On the festival side, the High Sierra, in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, is a good meeting place for fans of the genre.Punk
Since the end of the 1970s, the gentle Californian has seen the birth of a strong punk movement. Its taste for alternative lifestyles and its committed and resistant temperament took part in the birth of several outstanding bands, all gravitating in one way or another around the mythical Alternative Tentacles label founded by the no less legendary Dead Kennedys. The group is led by the charismatic and sweet crazy Jello Biafra, Californian by adoption (he was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1958), who tried for a while (in 1979), without success, to run for mayor of San Francisco against the governor of that time. Author, via his texts, of violent anarchist and sarcastic pamphlets against religion, conservatives - Reagan is one of his privileged targets -, racism, propriety or even the tyrants of the third world, Jello Biafra is more than a simple punk singer: he is the punk.
But what is commonly called "California punk" comes later. At the turn of the 1990's, a wave of bands, often more pop, more melodic, more fun too, gave a new life to the genre. In L.A., the band NOFX, in Orange County, The Offspring and in the Bay Area, Green Day or Rancid begin to know an unprecedented success in the field (which will know its apogee in the years 2000 with the commercial explosion of Green Day, The Offspring and Blink-182). Always angry, always militant but also often lighter and brighter than its predecessors, this Californian scene shakes up punk and even rock as a whole.
Punk scenes come and go, and often remain rather confidential. That said, the Cat Club offers a lot of music from the 1980s: goth, indus, new wave, punk, etc.Classical music
It is not part of the big five
of the most prestigious American orchestras - New York Philharmonic / Boston Symphony Orchestra / Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Philadelphia Orchestra / Cleveland Orchestra - but the San Francisco Symphony is still one of the best in the country. Founded in 1911, the San Francisco Symphony has gained worldwide renown over the past century thanks to the leadership of such excellent conductors as Seiji Ozawa of Japan in the 1960s, Michael Tilson Thomas of the United States, who accelerated his fame between 1985 and 2020, and now the excellent Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. The ensemble performs at Davies Symphony Hall, a beautiful auditorium with almost 3,000 seats. A golden opportunity to see it is to go to the Stern Grove Festival, which not only has the particularity of being held in the Stern Grove Park, an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by eucalyptus, fir trees and redwoods, but also of being... free. No excuse then.Jazz
When one thinks of jazz in the United States, one thinks first of the scenes in New Orleans, Chicago or New York. And yet the San Francisco area has an equally formidable, though lesser known, jazz scene. Not to mention that the oldest and most famous jazz festival in the United States has been held every year since 1958 in Monterey, south of San Francisco (The Monterey Jazz Festival). The emblem of jazz in the region is Dave Brubeck (1920 - 2012) and his quartet, which was all the rage in San Francisco and its bay area in the 1950s and then throughout the country very quickly afterwards. Often associated with the "cool jazz" aesthetic, some of his hits have become jazz standards, including In Your Own Sweet Way, Take Five, the fabulous Blue Rondo à la Turk and The Duke . An outstanding melodist, very technical, recognizable by his very elegant style, Dave Brubeck symbolizes West Coast jazz alongside other musicians, less known but equally loved across the Atlantic: Vince Guaraldi, a pianist as talented as he is prolific, Bobby Hutcherson, a vibraphonist and marimbist who notably signed the very good Components
in 1966 on the prestigious Blue Note label, Tom Harrell, widely considered as one of the best jazz trumpeters of the last twenty years and more recently rising stars such as the guitarist Julian Lage or the new vibraphone sensation Sasha Berliner. There are plenty of opportunities to hear jazz in San Francisco. First of all, there are two quality festivals: the Fillmore Jazz Festival, the biggest jazz festival on the West Coast, which is also free, and the San Francisco Jazz Festival, which runs throughout the month of June and is renowned for its dense and well thought-out program. The latter is held in the SFJAZZ Center, a center dedicated to jazz, including a 700-seat hall, rehearsal rooms, a digital music lab and a restaurant. Since its opening in 2013, the venue has gained international acclaim for the quality of its lineups. Other notable San Francisco scenes include Biscuits and Blues and Bix, two clubs that have become jazz institutions in the city. In Oakland, it's impossible not to mention Yoshi's Jazz Club, one of the best jazz clubs in all of California, with a very good Japanese restaurant. The best jazzmen in the world come to perform here. Jazz lovers can't miss this place.The rap
When we talk about West Coast rap, we refer 99% of the time to rappers from the Los Angeles area. However, in San Francisco they also rap. And not at all in the same way as in the City of Angels. There are rappers like E-40 or Too-Short, more funky, others like Lil B a little arty and prankster or others, still, like the rapper Kamaiyah who proposes a festive, hot and robust rap. Also, last but not least, although he is not from Oakland, the city has had a special place in the career of 2Pac since it is here that he made his first steps as a rapper in the group Digital Underground. On many occasions, the artist has proclaimed his love for the city, which has paid him back well by instituting in 2016 a "Tupac Shakur Day", every June 16 (his birthday). In short, although less extensive, the local scene has nothing to envy to its big sister Angelena.
