Bryan Gould, trombone and vocals.
Noel Jewkes, saxophones.
Brad Buethe, guitar.
Richard Saunders, bass.
Tony Johnson, drums.

$25 cover charge; byob.
Students, $10.  Kids free.
For a reservation, call the shop at 415-586-3733

Tunes from the 1930s and ’40s have inspired Swing Fever for many decades and they’ve been playing the music well over half a century. The band draws from a vast repertoire richly appointed with many, many hundreds of swing era classics and obscure masterpieces that they deliver with a rich and easy sanctified intelligence, as Billy Higgins would call it. Swing is never gone from real jazz, and the jazz of the swing era itself is immortal. Living proof. Here at Bird & Beckett! Swing Fever performs the music fresh as the day swing hit its stride as America’s dance music. 

“Swing Fever keeps its music alive without turning it into a museum piece,” says Jazz Now. But there’s plenty of musicological knowledge to be gleaned from the band on stage, with Bryan and Noel supremely able to entertain and with stories, biographical sketches and casual asides that revive the spirit of the people who created the music and the era that gave it life. All the players in Swing Fever have worked closely on bandstands and in studios with swing era practitioners playing at the peak of their abilities, and all have learned their lessons well, and gratefully, along the way.

Swing Fever declares: “The music is our passion. Rhythmic, romantic, torrid and witty, we’re crazy for it.”

“Swing Fever‘s ensemble sound is not only distinctive, it is unique.”
– Phil Elwood, SF Examiner

“Don’t miss Swing Fever the next time you see them on any schedule. Best of all, they are a lot of fun… Accept no ersatz substitutes when there are bands like this digging in with such good humor and solid chops.”
– Derk Richardson, SF Bay Guardian

Bryan Gould, trombonist, vocalist, raconteur, and leader of the band, founded Swing Fever after a career in journalism that started as a copyboy at the San Francisco News, where he wrote sports and feature stories. When the News shut down, he worked as a youth counselor for San Francisco and Marin counties. In 1978, Swing Fever, his baby & brainchild, was born. Appearances have been relatively rare in the past decade or so, but Swing Fever’s heyday easily ran more than four decades. With a monthly residency at the Panama Hotel in San Rafael as a base, the band traveled a circuit in Northern California playing venues and private parties, not incidentally including a good many wedding receptions, with singers including Mary Stallings, Jackie Ryan, and Denise Perrier, and instrumentalists including Dean Reilly, Howie Dudune, Jeff Massanari, Ruth Davies and many more.

Noel Jewkes is still king of the reed players in Northern California. He’s worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for decades, earning a distinguished reputation among jazz lovers. Noel has recorded with John Hendricks, Wesla Whitfield, Mary Stallings, Paula West, Mike Greensill, Lavay Smith, Bobbe Norris, Larry Dunlap, Larry Vuckovich, Pat Yankee and Jerry Hahn, and so many more, as well as his own ensembles. “I don’t know a better contemporary modern saxman anywhere” – Phil Elwood

Brad Buethe, guitar, found his professional footing in the 1970s with the Bill Bell band, backing such greats as Jon Hendricks, Joe Williams, and John Handy, and in the quintet of Grammy winner Mark Levine. In NYC in the ’80s, he worked with organist Jack McDuff, played regularly with Jaki Byard’s Apollo Stompers at Barry Harris’ Jazz Cultural Theatre, and was a member of The Quiet Nights Quartet–Macys’ in-house jazz band, and led a quintet featuring Joe Lovano on sax and Mike Clark on drums. He’s been back in the Bay Area for decades, ranked among the best players in the region by any measure.

Richard Saunders, bass, is ubiquitous around the Bay Area wherever good jazz is played without pretension or high drama. He’s played and recorded with Country Joe and the Fish, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Jessica Williams, Cat Anderson, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, in various TV shows and ads, and on movie scores. He’s proud of his work with Klez-X (formerly San Francisco Klezmer Experience). And he’s currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Community Music Center.

Tony Johnson, drums, left his native Australia and landed in British Columbia in the late 1950s, arriving in San Francisco in 1960. In October 1960, he recorded with Pony Poindexter and vocalist Bev Kelly on the singer’s “Live at the Coffee Gallery” lp engineered by Orrin Keepnews for Riverside Records. He proceeded to play at The Hungry Eye with Bobby Short and various other artists, and on the Ed Sullivan Show with Sammy Davis, Jr. and with the Vagabonds (a Las Vegas band of which he was musical director). Along the way, Tony toured with Earl “Fatha” Hines, worked with Peggy Lee at the Fairmont Hotel’s Venetian Room, was in the house jazz band at the Hyatt Regency for 5-1/2 years, toured with pianist Claude Williamson’s trio and was in Mike Vax’s Great American Jazz Band for 6 years. He’s been a hard swinging fixture on the San Francisco jazz scene ever since, well known to audiences at the soon-to-reopen Club Deluxe on Haight Street, at Geelou’s in the Marina, at the Comstock Saloon in North Beach, and many another venue living or just lingering vividly in our memories.