Scott Foster Meets the Masters… Buethe/Wiitala/Lateano

Guitarist Scott Foster performs with an ever-evolving cast of collaborators on the 3rd Friday of every month at Bird & Beckett. Lately, he’s been focused on bringing to our bandstand some of the great jazz players who have contributed so much to the depth and beauty of the San Francisco jazz landscape over the past seven decades. Tonight, Scott has invited guitarist Brad Buethe, bassist John Wiitala and drummer Vince Lateano to join him in two sets of music.

For 24 years and counting now, Scott has been a consistent and wonderful presence at Bird & Beckett. In late 2002, veteran tenor sax player Chuck Peterson invited Scott to join Chuck’s weekly “Jazz in the Bookshop” gig in a combo that featured three jazz veterans — saxophonist/arranger Bill Perkins, bassist Don Prell and drummer Jimmy Ryan. At the time, Scott was still in his early twenties and had only recently returned to the Bay Area, fresh out of Berklee College of Music in Boston. He’s been on our stage virtually every month since 2002, and has led his own date here each month for the past dozen years.

Vince Lateano, a Sacramento kid, got his start on the local scene in his early twenties under the mentorship of the late drummer John Markham, when Vince rousted out of the Army in the mid-1960s, playing all the jazz clubs of the era, touring, leading the house band at Jazz at Pearl’s, leading notorious jam sessions at Pier 23, the Dogpatch Saloon, the Seven Mile, Sweeties, Bird & Beckett… never pausing, always happy to play close to home, always swingin’.

Brad Buethe came out of UC Berkeley in the late 1970s, backing major artists including Joe Williams, Jon Hendricks and John Handy in Bill Bell’s big band, playing in David Hardiman’s San Francisco All-Stars Big Band in the chair most frequently associated with guitarist Calvin Keys, and working in the Mark Levine Quintet, before setting out for New York in 1982 where he played with Jack McDuff, Jacky Byard and Barry Harris and led his own quintet with Joe Lovano and Mike Clark. Brad returned to San Francisco in 1989, and the rest, as they say, is (more) history. One of the greats.

John Wiitala cut his teeth in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a fixture at Keystone Korner, playing with Joe Henderson, Junior Cook, Charlie Rouse, James Moody, Bud Shank, Cecil Payne and Jessica Williams, touring with Williams as well as Richie Cole, Arturo Sandoval and Shorty Rogers, and appearing at jazz festivals including Monterey, North Sea, Montreux, Detroit, JVC/Concord.

Bird & Beckett is proud to have presented all four of these giants of Bay Area jazz countless times in the past twenty seven years (Vince was the drummer in the first jazz trio date at Bird & Beckett, back in 1999, in a combo put together by bassist John Clark with Lee Bloom on piano; Vince’s current trio with bassist Peter Barshay and pianist Ben Stolorow plays here on the third Sunday of every other month and conducts a monthly jam session here as well).

We’re more than pleased to hear these four musicians together tonight.

$20 cover charge; byob.
Students $10. Kids free.

For a reservation, call the bookshop at 415-586-3733.