Arts Listings

Editor’s note: The preview for the 24th Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival which ran in the Oct. 17 issue of the Berkeley Daily Planet gave the wrong lineup. It repeated the list of last year’s festival performers. Below is the corrected information about the kick-off of this year’s festival. The preview of the rest of the festival will run next week. 

The 24th annual SF Jazz Festival begins tonight (Friday) with tenor saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins and continues for another 31 events through the Nov. 12 concert of Latin percussion great John Santos and the Machete Ensemble. This will be the most concentrated amount of great jazz available in the Bay Area all year. 

Without a doubt, the hottest ticket of the festival has got to be the Sonny Rollins kick-off concert at 8 p.m. at the Masonic Center. 

While still a teenager, Rollins was playing in New York with bop pioneers Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Miles Davis. By the early ‘50s, in a group with Max Roach, Clifford Brown and Richie Powell, he was ushering in the hard bop era. From 1959-61 he retired from music spending a large part of that time woodshedding on the Williamsburg Bridge. 

Since then, he has recorded an enormous amount of great music, yet often seems stymied in studio settings. In live concert performances, though, his ability to allow free reign to his improvisatory skills really shines. At 76, his physical and imaginative strength are undiminished. Whether he plays a standard like Dietz and Schwartz’ “I See Your Face before Me,” one of his classic hard bop originals like Oleo or one of his infectious calypsos like “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” he delights everyone with his swinging ability to vary tunes through subtle accentual shifts, harmonic genius and romantic lyricism. 

For more information on the SF Jazz Festival call (415) 788-7353 or visit their website at www.sfjazz.org.