Rock and the "San Francisco sound
Nothing is more typical of San Francisco and the Bay Area than rock. At the height of the 1960s counter-cultural ferment, full of hope and commitment, a wave of new bands embodied the values and ideas of this youth on the move. Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana and Jefferson Airplane, to name but a few, embodied this feverish, psychedelic aesthetic, which culminated in the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. The Fillmore (Pacific Heights) made a major contribution to the sound by hosting all these actors in the 1960s. To our great delight, the venue still exists today. Better still, it's still one of San Francisco's best concert halls, and headliners (mostly rock and indie) visiting the city regularly perform there.
Building on this past, San Francisco is still a resolutely rock city. A little less psychedelic - but it still runs in its veins - and a little more garage and abrasive, the local rock scene has produced and continues to produce stars of the genre who tour the world. Starting with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, the soaring, hallucinatory rock led by Anton Newcombe (a real character) and followed by a host of excellent bands, each more talented than the last: Ty Segall and Oh Sees (formerly 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 very much part of the sound's heritage, is the fabulous (the word is weak) Natalie Mering and her Weyes Blood project, a psychedelic, baroque pop phenomenon of finesse and beauty.
Aside from the Fillmore, there are a considerable number of venues where you can see a rock concert in San Francisco. The best are, without a doubt, The Bottom Of The Hill, a must-see for indie fans and a very popular venue with Franciscans that would be a shame to miss, as well as the Great American Music Hall, a 1907 cabaret and former brothel converted into a concert hall that has played host to all the big names, from Van Morrison to the Grateful Dead and 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
By the end of the 1970s, the gentle Californian had seen the birth of a strong punk movement. Its taste for alternative lifestyles and its committed, resilient temperament contributed to the birth of several landmark bands, all revolving in one way or another around the mythical Alternative Tentacles label founded by the no less legendary Dead Kennedys. The band is led by the charismatic, mild-mannered Jello Biafra, a Californian by adoption (born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1958) who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of San Francisco against the then governor in 1979. The author of violent anarchist and sarcastic pamphlets against religion, conservatives - Reagan was one of his favorite targets - racism, propriety and Third World tyrants, Jello Biafra is more than just a punk singer: he is punk.
But what is commonly known as "California punk" came later. At the turn of the 1990s, a wave of bands, often more pop, melodic and fun, breathed new life into the genre. In L.A., the band NOFX, in Orange County, The Offspring and in the Bay Area, Green Day or Rancid began to enjoy unprecedented success in the field (reaching its peak in the 2000s with the commercial explosion of Green Day, The Offspring and Blink-182). Always angry, always militant, but often lighter and brighter than its predecessors, this Californian scene turned punk, and indeed rock as a whole, on its head.
Punk scenes come and go, and often remain fairly confidential. That said, the Cat Club offers a lot of music from the 1980s: goth, indus, new wave, punk and so on.
Classical music
It's not part of the big five of America's most prestigious orchestras - New York Philharmonic / Boston Symphony Orchestra / Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Philadelphia Orchestra / Cleveland Orchestra - but the San Francisco Symphony is one of the country's finest. Founded in 1911, it has acquired worldwide renown over the course of the century thanks to the direction of such excellent conductors as Japan's Seiji Ozawa in the 1960s, the American Michael Tilson Thomas, who accelerated its reputation between 1985 and 2020, and now the excellent Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen.
The ensemble performs at Davies Symphony Hall, a beautiful auditorium seating almost 3,000. A golden opportunity to see it is to go to the Stern Grove Festival, which not only has the particularity of being held in Stern Grove Park, an open-air amphitheater surrounded by eucalyptus, fir and redwood trees, but also of being... free. So there's no excuse.
Jazz
When we think of jazz in the United States, we first think of the scenes in New Orleans, Chicago or New York. And yet the San Francisco region boasts an equally formidable, if lesser-known, jazz scene. Not to mention the fact that the oldest and most renowned jazz festival in the USA has been held every year since 1958 in Monterey, south of San Francisco (The Monterey Jazz Festival). The region's jazz icon is Dave Brubeck (1920 - 2012) and his quartet, who took San Francisco and the Bay Area by storm in the 1950s, and the country as a whole very soon 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, highly technical and recognizable by his elegant style, Dave Brubeck symbolizes West Coast jazz alongside other lesser-known but equally beloved musicians across the Atlantic: Vince Guaraldi, a pianist as talented as he is prolific, Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphonist and marimbist who notably signed the excellent Components in 1966 on the prestigious Blue Note label, Tom Harrell, widely regarded as one of the best jazz trumpeters of the last twenty years, and more recently rising stars such as guitarist Julian Lage or the new vibraphone sensation Sasha Berliner.
There's no shortage of opportunities to hear jazz in San Francisco. Firstly, there are two quality festivals: the Fillmore Jazz Festival, the biggest jazz festival on the West Coast, and a free one at that, and the San Francisco Jazz Festival, held throughout June, renowned for its dense, well-thought-out program. The latter takes place 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 renown for the quality of its line-ups. Other notable San Francisco venues 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 an excellent Japanese restaurant. The best jazzmen in the world perform here. Jazz lovers won't want to miss this establishment.
The rap
When we talk about West Coast rap, 99% of the time we're talking about rappers from the Los Angeles area. But San Francisco also raps. And not at all in the same way as in the City of Angels. There are rappers like E-40 and Too Short, who are funkier, others like Lil B, a bit arty and prankster, and others like rapper Kamaiyah, who offers a festive, warm and robust rap. And, last but not least, although he's not originally from Oakland, the city has had a special place in 2Pac's career, since it was here that the rapper took his first steps in the business, as part of the group Digital Underground. On numerous occasions, the artist has proclaimed his love for the city, which returned the favor in 2016 with a "Tupac Shakur Day" every June 16 (his birthday). All in all, the local scene, while not as extensive, has nothing to envy its big Angelena sister.
