Last night SFist went to see the inaugural live collaboration between the Bay Area's own Kronos Quartetand Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle. Competing only with her sister for the title of most prolific singer in recorded history, Bhosle and KQ teamed up recently to re-record a dozen or so RD Burman compositions from Bhosle's 20,000 (!) song catalogue for hifalutin label Nonesuch, home to NPR faves like Mali's Amadou & Mariam and indie legend Stephin Merritt. The crowd was pretty upmarket - with tickets topping out over 100 clams, this was not the sort of bustling young artist bash that YBCA has been excelling at of late. Kronos kicked off the evening solo, as it were, with a performance of a Terry Riley composition that featured frequent guest performer (so frequent that Kronos joked she was their newest member) Wu Man rocking the pipa and vocals. By SFist Isaac more ›

Big ups to SFist Eve for this week's Wednesdays post title! Wednesday: Get all in the Wednesday SFist Reads mood with a cavalcade of options: Barbara Ehrenreich at Clean Well-Lighted (7:00), a Dr. Atomic discussion at City Lights (7 p.m.), Caroline Kennedy at Grace Cathedral via Books Inc. (7:30, $25 tickets at Books Inc.), Terry Pratchett at Cody's on Telegraph (7:30), and Salman Rushdie at the Herbst Theater (8:00, buy tickets here). Thursday: our biggest local purveyors of hip classical music, the Kronos Quartet, kick off the first of two shows to support their new album of Bollywood standards at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The divine Asha Bhosle will be singing, and classical Chinese pipa-ist (that's the new Gothamist site, we know it!) Wu Man will play as well. Friday: You're going to our Webzine kickoff party, right? Right? SFist's hosting Webzine 2005's kickoff party at Cafe Du Nord, from 8-10 p.m.. Everyone's invited, even if you're not going to Webzine itself. Come by, check out our cool DJs, meet your favorite staffer, and see what SFist-themed toys we can scrounge up by then! (Contrary to rumors, we will not have a cardboard picture of Chris Daly for you to take pictures with. We will have Mrs. Chris Daly shirts for sale, though! Well, maybe we'll have them for sale. Hey, can we borrow your car to drive the Mrs. Chris Daly t-shirts over to Cafe Du Nord on Friday night?) Got an event you want to tell us about? Go right ahead! more ›

Put a brimful of Asha on your iPod ride! The Asha Bhosle who's name-checked by the Brit band Cornershop and is renown as the voice of Bollywood, has released a CD with San Francisco's best arbiters of new music tastes, the Kronos Quartet. Kronos has always sought to redefine classical chamber music from Viennese ladies doing the minuet to encompass all types of sonic sensation -- from contemporary pieces by Philip Glass and John Adams to Hendrix covers, Latin jazz, Argentinean tangoes, and African world music. Their latest record, You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood, features string quartet arrangements of songs from Bollywood films. Bollywood films are famous for their extended musical numbers, many of which were written by Asha Bhosle's late husband, R.D. Burman and performed by Ms. Bhosle, to be lip-synched by famous actresses in the actual movie. Burman and Bhosle are said to have sold more records than Elvis and the Beatles combined. And the album's a lot of fun! It's basically a Burman/Bhosle greatest hits collection -- Kronos and their posse of world musicians basically fade into the background and Bhosle lets it fly (check out the audio samples). The tunes are insanely catchy and -- well, we don't approve of listening to world music to feel exotic, but we did find ourselves hankering for something cardamom-flavored as we listened through. Kronos will be performing with Asha Bhosle on September 22 and 23 at the Yerba Buena Center. We hope they'll synch up some movies with the songs! more ›