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Jim Peterson brings guitarist Scott Foster and bassist Aaron Germain to Bird & Beckett tonight. Jim has played and taught saxophone and woodwinds in the Bay Area for more than 25 years. He picked up the sax in his teens and went on to study with Ed Tomasi, Randy Feltz and Joe Viola at Berklee School of Music in Boston, and locally with Bill Bell and Bill Trimble. Since settling in San Francisco, he’s been a freelance musician and side man with bands and ensembles including Beaufunk, Mitch Woods and His Rocket 88’s, Steve Lucky and the Rumba Bums and President’s Breakfast.  He’s a founding member and composer for MoFone, Giant Trio, Mumbo Gumbo and The New Squatoolas (the latter alongside Scott Foster, bassist Joe Kyle, Jr. and drummer Larry Vann). We’ve also heard him here with Kwela Kwela and more. Jim toured with both Steve Lucky and Mitch Woods, performing at jazz festivals and venues in Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, as well as locally with various groups at the Monterey Jazz and Blues Festivals. He’s also composed and performed for local theater productions of “The Still Point” and “The Connection,” as well as for a dance theater performance with local artists Carol LeMaitre and Joe Cunningham. And since 1996, he’s been a teacher at Blue Bear School of American Music at Fort Mason, teaching multiple band workshops as well as private lessons for sax, flute and clarinet. He was named Blue Bear’s Teacher of the Year in 2009 and was asked to join the Blue Bear Board of Trustees in 2011 as the teacher representative on the board.

“It will be especially nostalgic to play with Scott again on a Thursday night,” says Jim. “In the early 1990’s he and I had a regular Thursday night in North Beach at The San Francisco Brewing Company (now the Comstock Saloon) playing jazz standards and experimenting with new music. North Beach was hopping! Very creative times. I’m looking forward to bringing back some of that magic this Thursday.” Anyone who hears Scott Foster’s 2007 recording, “Night Blooming Jazzmen” will recognize Jim’s awesome arranging talents there, when not awestruck by Scott’s multivalent talents that infuse and transform the music on that cd, filling it with joy and bottomless vats of soul, always hip, always satisfying. Scott is a brilliant and prolific composer, as his five original compositions on that cd attest. Jim’s second track contribution, “Crescent City,” is a gem, perfectly set in Scott’s musical imaginings. He notes, “It’s going to be great to be back on stage with Scott and Aaron for the first time this year. The last time we played together was at the bookstore in August 2019!”

Growing up in Massachusetts, Aaron Germain cut his teeth playing upright and electric bass in bands playing jazz, blues, funk, reggae, Senegalese mbalax and more, while studying at Amherst’s Hampshire College with Yusef Latif and others and driving for gigs to New York and Boston and throughout New England. From the beginning, he learned to be picky about quality, not genre. A hired gun, Aaron spent 20 adventure-filled years traveling the world and learning from the masters, and that only continues. Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2000, he quickly found himself working overtime, sometimes two and three gigs a day, entering worlds of music from salsa and Afro-Cuban to Brazilian forro, Caribbean steel pan music, rock, pop; he’s found himself accompanying Indian kathak dancers and veteran Trinidadian calypso singers and navigating dense, odd-meter jazz compositions. He’s produced three cds of original music and is heard on countless others. The adventures continue; his musical associations are legion and only grow broader and deeper.

This is the jazz the San Francisco Bay Area is so proud of. Can’t hop a flight? No matter, we can’t let you in anyway. Catch it from home, whether Cincinnati or Istanbul. Or Constantinople, if you prefer. Tomatoes or Tomahtoes, it’s jazz. It’s all in your ear.

If you do hop a flight, hole up in your hotel room and watch the show. Let the management know you need a good hookup, a nice screen and good speakers. Bring your honey. Uncork a bottle of wine. As long as you share a biome, you’re golden.