San Francisco (Calif)

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares189 Views

    Nick Gravenites, Mainstay of the San Francisco Rock Scene, Dies at 85

    by

    A blues devotee from Chicago, he tasted fame in the late 1960s with the Electric Flag, a band that made its debut at Monterey but proved short-lived.Nick Gravenites, a Chicago-bred blues vocalist and guitarist who rose to prominence during the explosion of psychedelia in San Francisco in the 1960s as a founder of the hard-driving blues-rock band the Electric Flag and as a songwriter for Janis Joplin and others, died on Sept. 18 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 85.His son Tim Gravenites said he died in an assisted-living facility, where he was being treated for dementia and diabetes.Mr. Gravenites grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where he was part of a cadre of “white misfit kids,” as he put it on his website, who honed their craft watching Chicago blues masters like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in local clubs. His colleagues included the singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield and the guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop; all four of them would go on to help fuel the white blues-rock boom that began in the 1960s.“Being a ‘bluesman’ is the total blues life,” Mr. Gravenites said in a 2005 interview with Sound Waves, a Connecticut lifestyle magazine. “It has to do with philosophy.”“The life in general doesn’t ask much from you in terms of personality,” he continued. “It doesn’t ask that you be a genius, or a saint.” Many bluesmen, he added, fell far short of sainthood: “They just ask that you be able to play the stuff. That’s all.”Mr. Gravenites sang with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. From left: Mr. Butterfield, Jerome Arnold, Mr. Gravenites, Sam Lay, Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield.David Gahr/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Burning Man Has Sold Out Since 2011. Why Not This Year?

      by

      The desert arts festival returns this month after two consecutive years of challenging weather, including mud that stranded attendees, and a Covid-19 hiatus.Burning Man, the Nevada desert festival that routinely sells out tickets, is set to return this month, and ticket sales have slumped for the first time in years.It’s too soon to pin down what has caused the ticket sales shift, but factors most likely include two consecutive years of extreme weather, economic conditions and the organization of the Burning Man community. Here’s what to know.Tickets usually sell out for the desert festival.This year’s festival begins Aug. 25 and ends on Sept. 2, bringing tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to create a temporary community called Black Rock City, about 120 miles northeast of Reno.The festival began in 1986 on a San Francisco beach when people gathered to burn a wooden figure on the summer solstice. It moved to the desert in 1990 and sold out for the first time in 2011, and has continued to sell out, often quickly, every year since. Festival organizers had to cap attendance that year and stopped official ticket sales in early August, though last-minute tickets were usually still available on the resale market.The official ticket sale is done in segments, and this year, people can still buy a $575 ticket from the sale tier that opened on July 31. Tickets are also available for $225 for people with limited income. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported on this change earlier this month.Marian Goodell, the chief executive of the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, said in an interview on Wednesday that organizers expected this year’s Black Rock City population, which includes guests and staff, to be in the low 70,000s. Last year, the population was 74,126.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Jerry Miller, Moby Grape Guitarist, Dies at 81

      by

      He drew praise for his blues-inflected fretwork as his critically acclaimed band rode high, if briefly, during San Francisco’s Summer of Love.Jerry Miller, an acclaimed guitarist who emerged from the Pacific Northwest club circuit to make his mark on San Francisco’s psychedelic rock scene in the 1960s as a founding member of the lauded, if star-crossed, band Moby Grape, died on Sunday at his home in Tacoma, Wash. He was 81.His grandson Cody Miller said that he died in his sleep but that the cause was not yet known.Mr. Miller, whose fans came to include Eric Clapton and Robert Plant, played lead in the potent three-guitar attack of Moby Grape, a San Francisco quintet that hit its zenith in 1967, the year of the so-called Summer of Love.During its brief but shimmering heyday, Moby Grape was considered one of the top bands of the flower-power era. But while its psychedelic contemporaries in the city’s flourishing rock scene tended toward through-the-looking-glass lyrics and cosmic free jams, the band set itself apart by cranking out an earthy mix of blues, country, folk and chugging rock ’n’ roll — an eclectic approach that fit Mr. Miller’s musical philosophy, which he described in a 2013 interview with the website Blues.Gr as “a jolly good mix-up.”Moby Grape’s debut album, released in 1967, packed 13 songs into a tight 31 minutes. Rolling Stone once ranked it No.124 on its list of the 500 greatest rock albums, calling it “genuine hippie power pop.”ColumbiaMoby Grape’s debut album, called simply “Moby Grape” and released in 1967, contained 13 songs packed into 31 minutes. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it No. 124 on its original list of rock’s 500 greatest albums, describing it as “genuine hippie power pop.”Mr. Miller had a writing credit on six of those tracks, including “Hey Grandma” and “8:05,” which came to be hailed as classics of the era. The album was “one of the finest (perhaps the finest) to come out of the San Francisco psychedelic scene,” Mark Deming wrote on the site Allmusic.com.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      San Francisco’s Arts Institutions Are Slowly Building Back

      by

      Although attendance remains down from prepandemic levels, the city’s arts groups are having some success getting audiences to return.On a recent clear day, visitors were wandering through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to gawk at works by Yayoi Kusama and Alexander Calder, and, a few blocks away, making their way through the galleries at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Museum of the African Diaspora.That evening, music lovers poured in to Davies Symphony Hall to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the San Francisco Symphony and into the War Memorial Opera House across the street, where the San Francisco Opera was giving the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”Although attendance at the city’s arts institutions remains down from prepandemic levels — with tourism, hotel occupancy and office attendance yet to fully recover — its cultural ecosystem has been showing signs of inching its way back.Arts organizations around the nation have been struggling to regain audiences since the pandemic, with Broadway attendance about 17 percent lower than before and precipitous declines at many regional theaters, museums, orchestras and opera companies.San Francisco has its own particular challenges: People are returning to work, but the city’s office buildings remain emptier than those in Los Angeles or New York. Fewer people are taking Bay Area Rapid Transit downtown; the number of riders exiting at downtown stations is still down by more than half since 2019.The city and its cultural organizations have been struggling to overcome what Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, referred to as the “doom narrative,” the widespread media coverage of the city’s challenges, both real and exaggerated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Discord at the Symphony: Losing a Star, San Francisco Weighs Its Future

      by

      The struggles of one of the nation’s finest orchestras show the difficulties facing classical music in the United States.For a night at the symphony, there was a lot of tension in the air.As concertgoers filed in to Davies Symphony Hall earlier this month, they were greeted by players from the San Francisco Symphony passing out bright yellow fliers accusing management of having “no clear artistic vision.” Then, shortly before the performance began, a shout echoed from one of the balconies, exhorting people to “Act!”It was the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first concert in the hall since March, when he stunned the classical music world by announcing that he would step down as the orchestra’s music director amid a dispute with management over budget cuts. The evening’s program was just the sort of thing he had promised when he was hired with a mandate to rethink the concert experience: Ravel’s charming “Mother Goose” brought to life by dancers from Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, and then Schoenberg’s nightmarish “Erwartung” staged by the director Peter Sellars.His decision to leave once his contract is up next year has upset fans — “Who he is and what he brings can’t be replicated,” Mark Malaspina, an audience member, lamented as he entered the hall — and left some concerned about the future of the 113-year-old San Francisco Symphony.“An orchestra that was in very good shape is now in crisis,” said Peter Pastreich, a longtime arts administrator who managed the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999. “It is heartbreaking to watch.”Salonen’s unexpectedly short tenure in San Francisco is in some ways a very local story, but it also says something about the challenges facing classical music in 21st century America. Even before the pandemic, many orchestras around the country were struggling. Audiences were aging and shrinking. Costs were rising. Old business models were withering. And philanthropy, which has replaced ticket sales as the main source of income for most orchestras, was becoming increasingly hard to come by.When San Francisco landed Salonen, it was hailed as a coup.The orchestra enjoyed a reputation for musicianship and innovation and had a relatively large endowment. But it also had been running deficits, losing subscribers and seeing its donor base diminish. Salonen — a pathbreaking, charismatic conductor and composer from Finland who had previously led the Los Angeles Philharmonic — was seen as someone who could capture the imaginations of new audiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      At SFMOMA, Music is More than Just Sound

      by

      This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.The flute music was, you know, good flute music. But for the hushed audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s kickoff event in February of its “Art of Noise” exhibition, the breathy scales constituted only part of the experience.The colorful outfit belonging to the flutist (who was André 3000, by the way) was the experience, too. The crisp speakers were the experience, the smoke machine was the experience. And the two lasers passing through a glass of water balanced atop a traffic cone center stage — André 3000 has a growing interest in traffic cones, he had announced earlier — was the experience.Music is music. But music is also the stuff surrounding the music.From May 4 through Aug. 18, SFMOMA will illustrate this truism with an exhibition of visual and technological artifacts, plucked from music’s low orbit. “Art of Noise” comprises more than 800 pieces — among them early listening devices, cutting-edge speakers and iconic album covers — loosely grouped under the heading of design. Four more sound installations generate some artful noise all their own. But the show’s true subject might be our very relationship to music.Mathieu Lehanneur’s music player Power of Love, 2009 at SFMOMA.Mathieu Lehanneur; Photo by Don RossBeethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “The White Album,” Coltrane live at Birdland: On their own, these are but air molecules vibrating across our eardrums. Music becomes sacred partly through the material culture it inspires.And just as music shapes design — think jazz album cover versus metal album cover — design also codes how we hear music. In an old Xeroxed flyer for a punk show was information on how to absorb those songs; in an iconic ad for Maxell cassette tapes lurked signals about the spirit of rock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      NewJeans Asks U.S. Court for Help Finding YouTuber in Defamation Case

      by

      The request by NewJeans is the latest effort by the K-pop industry in its struggle to stem rumors on platforms based outside South Korea.NewJeans, one of the biggest K-pop acts, has asked a federal court in California to order Google to release the identity of the person behind a YouTube account that the members say is spreading defamatory statements about them.The group said that a YouTube user with the handle @Middle7 made the statements in dozens of videos that were viewed more than 13 million times, according to the court filing. The group’s lawyer, Eugene Kim, wrote that the account had also engaged in “name-calling or other mocking behavior” targeting NewJeans. The videos “continue to inflict significant reputational damage,” according to the filing.The move, made on March 27, is the latest example of K-pop stars responding to the pressures they face from the fervid online fan culture in South Korea. The request, if granted, would allow the group to sue the YouTube user in South Korea for defamation and insult, which are criminal offenses in the country.“We regularly take legal action for violations of artists’ rights,” Ador, the management agency for NewJeans, said in a statement, confirming that it was pursuing a case against the videos.Mun Hui Kim, a lawyer representing NewJeans in South Korea, declined to comment. Google did not respond to requests for comment. The YouTube account’s owner could not be reached.NewJeans, which has five members, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 list last year with its second album, “Get Up,” as part of the newest generation of South Korean girl groups dominating K-pop.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Esa-Pekka Salonen to Leave San Francisco Symphony

      by

      Esa-Pekka Salonen, the ensemble’s music director, said that he no longer shared the same goals as the administration, which has been cutting costs.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 2020, announced on Thursday that he would step down when his contract expires next year, citing differences with the orchestra’s board.Salonen, 65, a groundbreaking conductor who has promoted new music and experimented with virtual reality and artificial intelligence, said he no longer saw a path forward.“I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” he said in a statement. “I am sincerely looking forward to the many exciting programs we have planned for my final season as music director, and am proud to continue working with the world-class musicians of the San Francisco Symphony.”Disputes between maestros and management rarely break into public view, and this split is notable because of Salonen’s stature: A revered conductor and composer, he has been a leading force in efforts to redefine the modern symphony orchestra. In San Francisco, he appointed a team of what he called “collaborative partners” from a variety of genres, and he oversaw a steady stream of premieres.The rift between Salonen and the board appeared to be over efforts to cut costs, which include reducing the number of concerts and commissions, as well as putting tours on hold. The orchestra is also seeking to make unspecified shifts in programming to drive revenues. That approach raised broader questions about whether Salonen could achieve his expansive vision for the orchestra. (Salonen declined to comment for this article.)Matthew Spivey, the San Francisco Symphony’s chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra had different challenges and priorities than when Salonen was named the orchestra’s music director in 2018. The pandemic exacerbated longstanding budget woes, he said, and there were “significant financial pressures on the organization that have become impossible to ignore.” He said the orchestra would need to “evolve in various ways to respond to those pressures.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Joan Holden, 85, Playwright Who Skewered Rich and Powerful, Dies

      by

      As the principal writer for the Obie-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, she created iconoclastic left-wing satire that courted both chuckles and outrage.To Joan Holden, a fiercely left-wing playwright for the award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, life in a capitalist society offered almost too many targets: conniving politicians, labor-squashing industrialists and masters of war looking to profit by spreading conflict around the globe, to name just a few.As the theater collective’s principal playwright from 1967 to 2000, she largely trafficked in satire, collaborating on loose-limbed lampoons and melodramas like “Ripped Van Winkle,” about a 1960s hippie who conks out for decades after a monster L.S.D. trip and awakens to find himself trapped in a nightmare of yuppie greed and materialism in the 1980s.Even in the troupe’s broadest farces, the point was to make audiences chuckle their way to political enlightenment.Ms Holden during an event staged by her San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1969. Audiences needed little background to figure out the group’s leftist political leanings. via Holden family“I write plays about things I’m pissed off about, usually attacking people in power,” she said as part of a panel on humor in 1999, as reported in her obituary in The San Francisco Chronicle. She described humor as “the revenge of the powerless.”“Physically, I can’t get at these people,” she said, but she “can expose them to ridicule. Maybe I can’t slay the dragon, but I can make him look silly.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More