San Jose Inside

As you read this, downtown San Jose is in the throngs of a new enterprise called Left Coast Live. This is, perhaps, the purest example of what happens when a bunch of people, instead of sitting around and complaining, actually stand up and do something.

Silicon Alleys

Of all the books I initially acquired just for their titles, Eric Maisel’s Staying Sane in the Arts was one that stuck with me. Maisel is a renowned therapist who specializes in the psychology of the creative person. He’s written 30 books, delivered keynotes at numerous writers’ conferences and regularly runs creative workshops in both Paris and San Francisco. Staying Sane was the first of his books I happened to come across. I yanked it out of the library during the winter of 2000 when I needed something to read while stuck at a humdrum job with way too much downtime.

By any measure, this year’s San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival was a triumph. As a cultural event, it was world class, one of the best ever in our city or anywhere else in the world I have been. People attended from far and wide, including New York, Las Vegas, Tucson and Florida. The workshop students came from San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Bakersfield, Gilroy, Oxnard and, of course, San Jose. It was expertly programmed, well organized, drew large crowds of people of all ages (35,000 in total), colors and backgrounds, and it was entirely peaceful. The festival’s producer, Marcela Davison Aviles, and artistic director, Linda Ronstadt, deserve the high praise they are getting from everyone I talk to.

Two giants of San Jose’s jazz world died in late August within a week of each other. One was tall and always immaculately dressed, a Bellarmine-educated pianist, raised in the Santa Clara Valley and married into one of its wealthiest and most prominent families. The other was round and simply dressed, a working drummer who kept time for musicians like Cab Calloway and Mike Bloomfield in the hardscrabble clubs of New York and New Orleans. Both were passionate about music. Henry Schiro was the well-dressed impresario who booked performers; Sammy Cohen was the drummer who fought for fair compensation as head of the local musician’s union.

The time I knew Obama really had arrived to a younger generation is when his bootleg “Change” shirt was getting more requests at our Hip Hop Co-Op Shop than the Kanye West gear, or all the various shirts with prints of guns, which is like 80 percent of them. The young and hip in San Jose have been taking that iconic image of Obama’s face, and silk-screening their own versions of the shirts, adding symbols, and making new color combinations to match their vintage Air Jordans. They have made Obama theirs to keep.

On June 3, the San Jose City Council passed the controversial promoter ordinance that will regulate downtown nightlife by imposing fees and mandatory permits on event promoters and organizers. I don’t want to put too much on it, but the day after the ordinance passed, it was like someone had shot live entertainment in the head.

I have been to the San Jose Civic Auditorium once in my eight years of living in the city: a performance by towering jazz giants Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter about five years ago. A big jazz fan all my life, I have been lucky enough to see many of the greats, from Miles Davis to Weather Report, but the best jazz concert I have ever been to was definitely the one in the San Jose Civic that night. In fact, it was the most sublime musical experience of any type I have had, and that’s a hard list to top

This past Sunday, I attended a wonderful concert sponsored by South India Fine Arts (SIFA) at the Center for Employment Training auditorium on Vine Street. Part of a weekend of events celebrating the arts of southern India, the concert presented Chitra Visweswaran, one of the greatest living Indian Bharatanatyam dancers, with a group of master carnatic musicians, led by her husband, R. Visweswaran, on vocals. To sum it up in one word, the performance was sublime.

When I read that the San Francisco Symphony plans to come to San Jose on October 5 and play a free concert in Chavez Plaza, I jumped for joy. They are also increasing their number of performances at the Flint Center next season by adding three family concerts, and the symphony’s Youth Orchestra will present Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” in the California Theater on December 15. This is exactly the type of regional approach that we need to take here in Bay Area. How lucky we are to have our neighboring world-class orchestra coming here to play an absolutely free concert for our community and picking up the $100,000 tab themselves.