Three Visitors turned SFJAZZ’s Joe Henderson Lab into a sanctuary of deep listening, blending Steel House favorites and Three Visitors material in a telepathic acoustic set.

For de Marcos, Cuban dance music functions as a form of endurance, both personal and collective. He reminded the crowd that he had “given them the possibility to get back to the stage,” referring to the elders he had championed during the Buena Vista years, and he clearly felt a similar responsibility to the current ensemble. Thursday night’s performance, part of a four-night run at SFJAZZ, presented the music as a continuum that adapts to new hands and new circumstances while retaining its rhythmic backbone.

GRAMMY-winning guitarist John Scofield returned to Miner Auditorium for a three-night residency (November 6–8) alongside Combo 73, a lively quartet featuring pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Bill Stewart. Their performance on Friday night (November 7), crackled with grit, fire, and instinctive rapport, thrilling the audience with their undeniable chemistry.

Miner Auditorium resembled a communal altar on Halloween, with flickering candles, portraits of ancestors glowing, and a towering Día de los Muertos figure watching over. The stage was set as an ofrenda—the Día de los Muertos altar, filled with portraits and marigolds—while Hasta La Muerte unfolded as a ceremony of sound, dance, and testimony. The staging encouraged families to share their memories with the public, and the music provided a structure for those memories. From the first image to the last chorus, the night celebrated remembrance in life and involved the audience as participants and relatives.

The Branford Marsalis Quartet returned to SFJAZZ and set the room on fire with their first notes. In a sold-out Miner Auditorium, the music favored chamber-level precision, dynamic nuance, and seasoned control. Lines were shaped as complete statements, with the focus on ensemble balance and detail.

Some bands chase heat; The Cookers shape it—transforming velocity into design and treating their repertoire as a living lab for risk. On this night at Miner Auditorium, the seven-piece didn’t rely on memory. They played in the present tense, with charts that encourage lift, turn, and smooth landings, the way only a seasoned band with deep trust can deliver. The premise was simple and powerful: craft a set that breathes, then push until the edges feel new again.

Listening became the real instrument onstage, a single invisible string stretched between Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau and humming all night. At the Presidio Theatre, they approached repertoire as conversation and memory as form, leafing through familiar tunes like a well-loved book, reading passages aloud, underlining new meanings, and showing how a lifetime of music speaks through them.

What happens when a songwriter transforms an intimate space into a map and invites us to follow her route? That was the guiding question of Becca Stevens’ early set at the Joe Henderson Lab, where voice and guitar became coordinates, and each song represented a mile of lived experience. The premise was straightforward: Maple to Paper, her 2024 voice-and-guitar cycle, performed without a safety net. What made the night engaging was how precision and honesty went hand in hand—open tunings that revealed unexpected colors, lyrics that conveyed grief and determination equally, and stage talk that clarified her process without smoothing out emotion.

…Throughout the evening, the main theme was resilience that avoids spectacle. We learned—briefly and without melodrama—why Patti moved slowly: a concussion from a fall in Milan, lingering vertigo, and a cold. Then came the moment that always seems to happen at a Tuck & Patti show: the confession turns into craft. The story leads to a song as she weaves a witty, bluesy aside about ditching the high heels and holding onto faith. The crowd recognized the magic that has defined this partnership since the late ’70s: personal details turned into shared emotion.

A spare duo becomes an engine—voice and piano reworking Monk, Ellington, theater, and rock into a present-tense argument for hope, empathy, and the living tradition of jazz.