Join your friends from Bird & Beckett this Sunday, April 30th at Keys Jazz Bistro–Broadway at Kearny in North Beach–for a five-hour cavalcade of great San Francisco jazz musicians coming together in the Independent Musicians Alliance to build labor solidarity and jamming to fill the coffers of the IMA’s “Musicians Assistance Fund.”

The IMA, born a scant year ago and growing like Topsy through grit, hard work and determination, is giving the City’s freelance musicians a collective voice, while the Fund is easing its members’ manifold economic stresses by making grants to members for rehearsals, gig cancellations, instrument repair, storage, cartage, travel and parking, and quite a lot more.

Bird & Beckett and Jazz in the Neighborhood’s Mario Guarneri came together to stake the IMA to $8k to get the fund rolling and $5k+ has been given out in the past six months. This Sunday, we want to raise $5k more, and more on top of that, to build the fund back up and keep it growing.

More than two dozen IMA members will donate their time Sunday, April 30 to give you a great show, to show off ally  Simon Rowe’s Keys Jazz Bistro–the City’s newest major jazz venue–and to demonstrate the soul-nourishing power of the music!

Do your part to demonstrate the City’s commitment to its artists!

Sunday afternoon’s marathon concert of IMA musicians will feature Akira Tana as MC for the afternoon, performing double duty as one of the five featured bandleaders, alongside Brian Andres, Kristen Strom, Scott Foster, and Simon Rowe.

Five aggregations of IMA musicians–with sets beginning on the hour from 2pm to 6pm and wrapping up at 7pm–will jam on stage, demonstrating the depth of talent & the joy of jazz that San Francisco’s hard working, professional jazz players employ to create the luster that makes San Francisco one of the half-dozen key jazz cities in America!

Jazz has a long tradition in San Francisco, from the Barbary Coast days into the swing and bop era, through the heady years of the 1950s and 1960s to this very day. North Beach had Enrico Banducci’s Hungry i and the Purple Onion, the Jazz Workshop and Sugar Hill, Todd Barkan’s Keystone Korner and Pearl Wong’s Jazz at Pearls, and now it has Simon Rowe’s Keys Jazz Bistro, bringing jazz back into the hallowed space that was once Barnaby Conrad’s El Matador, a showcase for San Francisco’s own Cal Tjader, Oscar Peterson, the Modern Jazz Quartet and scores of other legendary performers and groups.

The City’s iconic status right now and its economic flowering rely on its cultural magnificence, including its working musicians’ great sonic artistry wafting from the saloons, clubs and restaurants into the farmers markets, street festivals and public displays of performing art that make San Francisco a magnet for visitors, enliven its residents’ lives and make its neighborhoods pop!

Help the goose keep laying that golden egg! Bring your checkbook to Keys–or tap out any amount from your digital bank–and be part of the movement that will keep jazz alive and thriving in San Francisco by supporting the economics and the voice of its freelance musicians! Read more here on the IMA’s site!

Want to donate but can’t make it to the party? Click here!