SFJAZZ has announced its 2026-27 season, "Forward Motion," featuring more than 350 concerts that honor jazz's history while spotlighting the artists shaping its future.

Barbara Riching reflects on preserving the intimate spirit of The Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, the legendary Half Moon Bay jazz venue founded by her father Pete Douglas, while navigating the challenges of presenting world-class live music in today’s landscape.

Arturo Sandoval’s new album SANGÚ reconnects the trumpet master with the Afro-Cuban rhythms, improvisational fire, and emotional storytelling that shaped his musical identity. The album arrives ahead of his June appearances at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland.

At SFJAZZ’s Listening Party, Immanuel Wilkins gave audiences a first look inside his residency week: the questions behind Recitations, the mentors who shaped him, and the deeper purpose of bringing listeners into the work before the concerts began.

Night 1 of SFJAZZ’s Miles Davis centennial series framed Doo-Bop as Miles Davis’s final act of forward motion, with Sway Calloway, Easy Mo Bee, Vince Wilburn, Donald Harrison, and DJ Flow tracing how the trumpeter moved toward hip-hop with purpose, appetite, and instinct.

As SFJAZZ marks Miles Davis: A Century of Cool, these five albums offer a sharp path through one of modern music’s most restless and influential careers.

On the final night of Omar Sosa’s SFJAZZ residency, the SUBA Trio brought Cuba, Senegal, and Venezuela into a luminous conversation of kora, piano, percussion, and shared pulse.

On the second night of Omar Sosa’s SFJAZZ residency, the Aguas Trio transformed Miner Auditorium into a ceremonial space where water, rhythm, and improvisation flowed together in a powerful spiritual performance.

Night one of Omar Sosa’s four-night residency at SFJAZZ pairs the Cuban pianist with the Stanford Jazz Orchestra. From backstage rehearsal rituals to a powerful big-band performance in Miner Auditorium, the evening becomes a meeting point between generations of jazz musicians.

Lettuce capped its four-night SFJAZZ residency by turning Miner Auditorium into a joyous funk revival. Steve Roby reviews a night of deep grooves, fearless improvisation, and a dance floor that refused to stay seated.

Steven Bernstein brought Sexmob back to the Bay Area for a set devoted to 1960s psychedelic rock. The opening night at SFJAZZ's Joe Henderson Lab began unevenly before finding its groove with inventive takes on Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.

The Police drummer brings his first American spoken-word tour to the Presidio Theatre and packs fifty years — Beirut, punk, Coppola, opera, the reunion — into one chair, one lamp, and a drum full of audience questions. Conflict, he argues, was the secret sauce.

At 85, the Cuban piano giant turned Miner Auditorium into a journey through Mozart, Ravel, and Shorter — and it all came out as pure Chucho.

On May 24, Gunhild Carling brought her family band, six instruments, and an impromptu stomp to SFJAZZ's most intimate room.

Rather than presenting Miles Davis as a finished monument, John Beasley and his sextet treated the legendary trumpeter's music as an unfolding conversation during a dynamic 90-minute set at San Francisco's Presidio Theatre. This performance marked the final, brilliant stop of Beasley's Miles Davis tribute tour in the Bay Area.

Hiromi Uehara and Sonicwonder turned their SFJAZZ-presented Golden Gate Theatre concert into a high-voltage night of jazz fusion, theatrical movement, and musical lift-off.

A promised tribute to Bay Area radio pioneers gives way to a slow, meditative evening that finds its footing only in flashes.

At SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium, Aaron Diehl led his trio through a measured, deeply focused set that balanced originals, standards, and seven Roland Hanna preludes, all shaped by precision, space, and attentive interplay.

Endea Owens’ performance centered groove as a social language, with Sullivan Fortner’s pianism sharpening the ensemble’s focus. The set balanced compositional clarity with fluid interaction, revealing a band attuned to both lineage and forward motion.

Gerald Clayton closed his reunion tour at SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium with bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown, delivering a set that balanced space, precision, and trio interplay. The performance traced a shared musical language shaped over decades and still evolving in real time.

Lee Ritenour brought a refined quartet to SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium, balancing fusion-era precision with a controlled, groove-centered approach shaped by tone, phrasing, and ensemble interplay.

Stewart Copeland brings Police Deranged for Orchestra to Miner Auditorium, reworking the Police catalog with symphonic scale and raising questions about how much bite survives the expansion.

Emmet Cohen’s sold-out SFJAZZ performance approached Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s centennial as a living tradition, balancing high-velocity interplay, atmospheric depth, and a forward-looking original suite.

Keb’ Mo’ opened his sold-out four-night SFJAZZ run with an intimate, story-rich set at Miner Auditorium, joined by his son K. Roosevelt on drums and percussion. The evening balanced warmth, humor, political resonance, and the lived authority of a musician fully at home in his own sound.

At SFJAZZ, Monty Alexander turned a Sunday-night set into a vivid memoir in sound, folding swing, reggae, humor, and hard-earned feeling into a performance shaped by a lifetime of stories.

At SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium, Pasquale Grasso opened with elegance and finely controlled swing, but Lakecia Benjamin’s blazing second set supplied the night’s real dramatic center. The contrast made for an intriguing double bill, even if the programming never fully found its arc.

At Miner Auditorium, José James closed his 1978: Revenge of the Dragon tour with a set that moved through soul, fusion, disco, hip-hop, and jazz, turning Friday night into a charged, flirtatious, high-volume celebration.

Immanuel Wilkins’s March 2026 SFJAZZ residency moves from conversation to premiere to performance, tracing a four-day arc that includes a listening party, the debut of his commissioned work Recitations, and intimate Joe Henderson Lab sets with special guest David Murray.

The final night of SFJAZZ’s Miles Davis centennial celebration brought the Miles Electric Band to Miner Auditorium, while a broader arc came into focus across the full four-night series. Through insights from Vince Wilburn Jr. and Keyon Harrold, the week revealed Miles Davis as an artist who kept moving toward the next sound.

Across two Saturday performances in Miner Auditorium, Eddie Henderson, Javon Jackson, Donald Harrison, Patrice Rushen, Buster Williams, and Lenny White treated Kind of Blue as living language, giving Night 3 of SFJAZZ’s Miles Davis centennial celebration its deepest historical weight and clearest spirit of musical exploration.

Night 2 of SFJAZZ’s Miles Davis centennial series shifted from argument to atmosphere, as Gil Goldstein, Keyon Harrold, and Lenny White revisited the Davis-Gil Evans songbook with orchestral color, historical feeling, and a chamber-like sense of scale.

At the Joe Henderson Lab, Hugo de la Lune turned his SFJAZZ debut into a meditation on lineage, faith, and self-reclamation, shaping voice and harmony into a living architecture of identity.

SML transformed the Joe Henderson Lab into a pressure chamber of modular synthesis and percussive force during a 53-minute, unbroken set that fused Chicago experimentalism with West Coast grit.

On the second night of her two-night run at SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium, Madeleine Peyroux delivered a socially conscious, intimate performance that transformed the room into a global neighborhood.

In a raucous, high-voltage set at the SFJAZZ Joe Henderson Lab, Berkeley bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa led Five(ish) through the shifting biomes of a newly imagined cosmos.

ransforming the Miner Auditorium into a velvet-draped sanctuary, the vocalist commanded 50 years of jazz history with industrial precision and domestic warmth.

A brass-heavy New Orleans collective transformed the SFJAZZ Center into a technicolor street parade.

At the SFJAZZ Joe Henderson Lab, Tyreek McDole transformed a sold-out residency into a spiritual summons. Through the music of Horace Silver, Alice Coltrane, and Andre 3000, the 2023 Sarah Vaughan Competition winner explored how inner healing creates a better world.