SFist interviews Glenn Kotche about his collaboration with the Kronos Quartet as part of the SF Jazz Fest more ›

We were super-excited when we got the chance to talk with Alex Ross, the New Yorker's resident classical music critic (and blogger). Ross's writing has profoundly affected the way we think about music and music writing in all its genres and forms, and his twin enthusiasm for new classical music of the 21st century along with his deep love of the profoundly musical Icelandic pixie that is Björk always liven up our weekly periodicals reading list. (Thanks for helping set it up, M.C-!) more ›

More giveaways! San Francisco's own Kronos Quartet has a new album out, of their acclaimed September 2003 live performance with Tom Waits of four of Waits's songs, for the Concert for Peace and Reconciliation by Richard Gere's Buddhist humanitarian organization Healing The Divide with the Dalai Lama in attendance. There's also performances by Norah Jones's sister Anoushka Shankar, Philip Glass, and the Guyto Tantric Choir. We've got a copy to give away! more ›

--The Dyke March was fun. [Chron.] more ›

, on Hugo Chavez and Latin America), and music by the Kronos Quartet. The event is a benefit for the Media Alliance, which is celebrating 30 years of responsible left-wing media representation. more ›

Saturday: we're hitting the YBCA (700 Howard Street at Third) for the SFist Krissy-recommended Kronos Quartet and experimental musicians, Matmos and Walter Kitundu collaboration. Sure, we love the Kronos Quartet and Matmos, but we're also eager to see the extraordinarily threatening Kitundu in action. Shows are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., buy tickets here. more ›

SFist interviews Mara Sohn of Yerba Buena Center for the ARts more ›

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 ›

You probably remember that brief brouhaha about the CD price-fixing antitrust case, where that judge was going to give everyone who'd ever bought a CD from 1995 to 2002 $14.99 if they sent in their name and address, right? Well, as part and parcel of that settlement, all the CD companies agreed to send free CDs to public libraries across the land. Well, hey -- our beloved San Francisco public library just got its Columbia Record Club shipment, and received: 91 copies of Ricky Martin's Sound Loaded, 81 copies of Jessica Simpson's Irresistible, and 68 copies of Celine Dion's greatest hits. We're going to reserve ours online right now! Jaundiced athenaea-nauts are grumbling that the record companies appear to be dumping poorly-selling records on libraries (Irresistible, for instance, is the second Jessica Simpson album, the one that came out before Newlyweds), but cheerier librarians are storing, say, their 106 copies of Lenny to give away as prizes for summer reading contests. Check out what everyone else in California is getting. (For instance, San Francisco Unified (.pdf) is getting 51 copies of Whitney Houston's "Star Spangled Banner," 7 copies of "Carmen: A Hip Hop-era," 5 copies (clean) of The Wu Tang, and a smattering of Kronos Quartet and John Adams CDs, among many, many others). more ›

Well, SantaCon has come and gone, but you still have that urge to make with the merry this holiday season, preferably through participatory art? Well, you're in luck -- San Francisco is hosting its annual performance of Phil Kline's Unsilent Night tonight. Unsilent Night is music intended to be played on boomboxes on a stroll through the city, so participants become in essence a big stereo system, playing Christmas carols (yeah, sort of like KOIT, if they played the Kronos Quartet). The original Unsilent Night was performed in 1992 on a walk through a block in the East Village, and now the piece is performed every year in New York, San Diego, Vancouver, and Cleveland, along with SF. If you're interested in participating, bring a boombox with a cassette player and fresh batteries and meet up at Dolores Park before 7 p.m. (RSVP so they'll know how many tapes to bring; if you don't have a boombox, you can borrow one). The group will be walking around the Mission too for about 45 minutes so bundle up. more ›

For those of you who like your ethnomusicology less with the pan flutes and more with the non-Western modalities, the San Francisco World Music Festival is presenting a number of innovative programs for the next two weeks. Headlining the festivitires is San Francisco's own Kronos Quartet, who are playing a special local show, sandwiched in between their European tour and their upcoming BAM Next Wave performance in New York. more ›