Freebie of the week: It’s called the New Farm, but its roots go back to mid-1970s San Francisco, when nobody thought twice about a working farm also being a community center, environmental art gallery, and concert venue. This weekend, those roots will be celebrated in rousing fashion with a free concert of old-school punk.
The original spot, known as The Farm/Crossroads Community, was founded by Bonnie Ora Sherk, a San Francisco artist, and Jack Wickert on what is now Cesar Chavez Street and Potrero Avenue. It had a vegetable garden, grazing pasture, an educational center and gallery, and hosted all manner of performance art events and concerts. In the 1980s, after Sherk departed, the site became a mix of modern urban park and rock/punk spot that hosted such A-List bands as Camper Van Beethoven, Bad Brains the Descendents and Soundgarden. The site closed and was repurposed in 1987.
Flash forward to 2019: The New Farm is created by a GoFundMe drive organized by Andrew Pollock, president of an environmental nonprofit known as Green City Project. The New Farm has a new location in Bayview at 10 Cargo Way, adjacent to a park, a nursery and a grazing pasture, and its space and facilities are available for events, exhibits and concerts. Everyone affiliated with the New Farm is a volunteer and all the public events are free, including Saturday’s Another Day on The Farm concert featuring a fab lineup of beloved old-school San Francisco punk bands, including the legendary No Alternative (still led by singer-guitarist John “Genocide” Patterson), The Sleepers, Temple Beautiful Band, Sacripolitical and more.
The free show runs from 2 to 8 p.m., and no tickets are necessary. More information on the New Farm is at thenewfarmsf.org; details about the show are on the New Farm’s Facebook page.
Another freebie: Each year, during January’s dreary season, folks in San Francisco are visually serenaded by colorful hearts of varying sizes bearing a wide variety of often-dazzling designs. While it’s lovely to imagine that some benign deity or extraterrestrial is depositing the fiberglass-and-resin beauties to perk up a city that hasn’t won a major sports world championship in who knows how long, the real story is pretty cool, too. Hearts in SF is a 20-year-old annual fundraiser by San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, which commissions the works and places them in public spaces around the city. Then art lovers bid on them, with winning bids and payments going to the hospital.
Note: Buyers must be art lovers: these suckers ain’t cheap. Bidders should be ready to part with a five-figure sum (and that’s for the smaller, lesser-in -demand pieces). The cool thing is it doesn’t cost a cent to look at them. Through Monday, many are on view at the Ferry Building.
Find more information on the hearts, the bidding and the related gala on Feb. 6 HERE. Get a map of some hearts on permanent display in the city HERE.
A Latin jazz icon: Latin jazz percussionist and bandleader John Santos has been a mainstay of the Bay Area music scene for half a century and, as hokey as it sounds, we are darned lucky to have him. He’s respected around the globe—logging six Grammy nominations over his career—and for his knack for assembling bands and orchestras representing a staggeringly diverse range of sounds. Yet he keeps his deep catalogue of recorded music local, releasing albums on his own Machete Records label.
On Saturday, he’ll star in a concert at the Freight & Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley. Billed as a celebration of his new album “Horizontes” and Machete Records’ 40th anniversary, the show features Santos and his acclaimed Sextet, which was formed in 2003. An impressive array of special guests includes the globally revered Orestes Vilató on timbales; vocalists Christelle Durandy, Willie Ludwig and Juan Luis Pérez; violinist Anthony Blea; percussionist Javier Navarrette; and Pedro Pastrana on the cuatro, a form of lute that is the national instrument of Puerto Rico.
The Freight holds a special place in Santos’ history, he has performed there often and curated Latin music shows. Expect a wide range of Latin jazz styles to emerge when Santos and friends take the stage. The show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $44 in advance, $49 at the door. Go to thefreight.org.
A turn toward innovation: This week brings the return of San Francisco Performances’ annual PIVOT Festival—this one will be its 10th incarnation —curated this year by composer-singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, whose “emergency shelter intake form” oratorio about the rampant housing crisis was performed by the San Francisco Symphony two years ago. Kahane will conduct the first of the three programs of the festival, which is designed to highlight innovation and expand the boundaries of traditional concert performances, and host the following two. It opens at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 29 in Herbst Theatre, with Kahane leading violinist Carla Kihlstedt, pianist Sarah Cahill, the Del Sol Quartet and members of Sandbox Percussion in a presentation of Kihlstedt’s “26 Little Deaths,” inspired by macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey’s spooky but hilarious run down of the alphabet from 1963.
The 7:30 p.m. Jan. 30 program features singer-songwriter-guitarist Haley Heynderickx collaborating with the brass quartet The Westerlies on his own works and some of his covers, and the festival closes at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 31 with Sandbox Percussion returning to perform “Seven Pillars,” a bold, Grammy-nominated work from 2021 by Pulitzer-winning composer Andy Akiho.
Find single tickets, $45-$65, at sfperformances.org, or call (415) 392-2545. Full festival tickets are $120-$180.
Masterful Mozart and more: Conductor Donato Cabrera and his California Symphony have set out this season to present works by famous composers written at the height of their achievements, so we will hear Wolfgang Amadeus’ most famous and last symphony, the No. 41 in C Major, commonly known as the “Jupiter,” to close out this weekend’s concerts at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. But the programs, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday, will open with “Breathe,” a meditative piece by American composer Carlos Simon, and will continue with Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo’s most famous work, the gorgeous “Concierto de Aranjuez,” with soloist Meng Su of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music performing on guitar.
Tickets, $25-$110, are available through californiasymphony.org or by calling (925) 943-7469.
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