Music
Fragments of jazz progressions and classical nocturnes filled the air at Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company last weekend as customers gathered to admire, play—and purchase—the store’s recently acquired inventory of pianos from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
On the fourth Wednesday of each month, a part of Spain – an especially passionate part, with a centuries-old history – comes to downtown Oakland. It’s called Flamenco Downtown night, at Disco Volante
Record lovers have followed Groove Yard from Jack London Square to Temescal to its current spot on Claremont Avenue in Rockridge. The record store, owned by Rick Ballard, specializes in hard-to-find jazz, world, and soul music.
Freedom House: Dancing in the Flatlands is a new performance work by Claudine Naganuma. The piece will be shown three times at East Oakland’s EastSide Cultural Center this weekend, starting with an 8 p.m. performance Friday night. Naganuma is the director of Danspace, a dance studio in Rockridge, and the founder of the dance company dNaga, which will be performing the piece.
SoundWaves continues this Thursday with pop music by Young Digerati, from 5:30 to 7:30pm, on the waterfront of Jack London Square.
In May, Rob “Reason” Silver, a part-time record producer from Oakland, and Jason Samel, the owner of a small insurance brokerage in New York, announced their nearly identical but independently conceived plans to bring a new element into the national Occupy protest—marketability. Both had come to the conclusion that there was potential within the anti-capitalistic, determinedly decentralized protest to sell a product that could help raise funds and draw in new supporters. In May, both men launched Occupy benefit albums.
Around 3,000 people turned out in Mosswood Park on Saturday to celebrate Enkutatash, the Ethiopian New Year.
Around 350 people came to the New Parish in Oakland to see Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux perform on Wednesday along with Raw G, 2 Mex, Hordatoj, Magnolius and DJ Nima Fadavi. Tijoux, who is petite and in the early stages of pregnancy, swayed to her drummer’s military beat and spit out rhymes with self-assured, low-key confidence. Dressed in a flannel shirt and black tights, her style was more ‘90s b-girl than rising international hip-hop star.
In a parking garage in East Oakland’s Jingletown neighborhood, an enormous piece of local music history gazes out at parked cars. More than ten feet tall, and sporting sunglasses, the relic is a stage prop modeled after rapper Shock G. The head was featured in a 1993 music video by rapper Shock G’s platinum-selling group, Digital Underground, and went out with the group on tour. Now it collects dust and dirt from exhaust pipes.