Students frame the pros this weekend, with a cavalcade of SFSU creative arts students converging for a poetry and music revue Thursday evening and a gaggle of jazz students from SFCM celebrating the impending end of the semester Sunday evening.

In between, on Friday and Saturday, we present three significant jazz concerts and a book launch!

Friday at 6pm, the 230 Jones Street band celebrates the memory of  veteran pianist Si Perkoff, and at 8pm we present Seattle avant guitarist Mike Gamble’s trio with bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, herself a key figure in the Bay Area avant garde.

Saturday evening, two giants of the music, Phillip Greenlief and Scott Amendola, get in a few final duo licks as Phillip prepares to decamp with his wife for Maine this summer! Catch this one, and mark your calendar now for two nights of shows with Phillip’s long running Lost Trio on June 14 and 15.

And don’t miss neighborhood writer Jason Friedman’s party Saturday afternoon at 4pm! University of South Carolina Press has just brought out his deep literary dive into the 19th century life and times of the prominent slave-owning family that built the house on Liberty Street in Jason’s hometown, Savannah, Georgia, in which Jason and his husband bought a flat a few years ago — a story centered on patriarch Solomon Cohen’s son, Gratz, the “golden boy” of the book’s subtitle, who died on the battlefield in the final weeks of the war with complex and conflicted feelings vividly and sensitively explored and conveyed in Jason’s writing, a Confederate soldier on the battlefield facing the enemy, age 20, son of Georgia’s first Jewish Congressman, struggling valiantly and painfully to understand himself.