Eight years ago, in 2017, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s “Roots, Jazz & American Music” B.Mus. program welcomed its first crop of young, supremely talented aspiring jazz musicians. After 100 years as an august bastion of western classical music, the Conservatory had finally given due recognition to America’s own true classical music, the music developed over four centuries from the musical traditions of West Africa, forged in the tragedies of slavery and the joys of creative oral expression. The RJAM program has served its students well. Many of the young players you hear coming through Bird & Beckett are current students and alumni of the program, developing into amazing professional players before our very eyes and ears.

This evening on the Bird & Beckett bandstand you’ll hear a combo comprising current RJAM students, including some finishing their senior year, as the program prepares to graduate its second full cycle of undergrads. A jam session will cap the evening, always a wonder and a pleasure, with student musicians of all ages falling by with their instruments from all around the Bay. 

In that RJAM founding year of 2017, up the hill from Bird & Beckett lived one of our new bookshop customers, obvious to us a major jazz fan. It transpired that Glen Park had welcomed the pianist & educator Simon Rowe, now the proprietor of Keys Jazz Bistro in North Beach, then fresh up from his position as Director of the Brubeck Institute in Dave Brubeck’s hometown of Stockton. It was Simon who conceived and built the program, recruited its first freshman class, and coined its slogan, “Our tune has a new bridge.” 

Jason Hainsworth came in to assist Simon in those early years and now runs the program, assisted by Amelie Anna Hinman, a Swiss conguero recruited as a student by Simon. Now, many of the Bay Area’s top flight jazz musicians serve as faculty and ensemble coaches, including Akira Tana, Patrick Wolff, Keith Saunders, Tony Peebles, Jeff Cressman, Ken French, Mario Guarneri, Kristen Strom and Randy Vincent, all of whom have played Bird & Beckett multiple times over the 20+ years that we’ve been presenting live jazz with an overweening focus on the working cats who make San Francisco a world-renowned jazz capitol.

Today, a crop of current RJAM students will bring a jazz combo coached by Saunders, with a jam session to follow for all comers.

This is today’s jazz, and its future!