It began with my sister's visit 3 weeks ago. I took her to the newly opened SFJAZZ center for a concert by the SFJAZZ Collective, the "house" band of the 20+ year and running festival. It was the first time I've been there too even though I've been curious (or I should say skeptical) about the concept of a building dedicated to jazz (well, I'm not the only one. Even a SFJAZZ collective member said he thought it could not have happened) I should have been to one of legendary jazz bassist Dave Holland's concert earlier in the year but I missed it. Anyway, the theme of the concert was playing music inspired by pianist Chick Corea and rearrangement of his works. Chick Corea was a name I learned when I was a kid listening to HK's Jazz Radio Programme (yes, such thing existed back then. The DJ was all excited when Miles Davis and Pat Metheny visited HK. RTHK3 still has a jazz programme these days) To be honest, for some unknown reason, I am not familiar with Chick Corea's work at all even after all these years listening to jazz. Almost each member of SFJAZZ collective (there were 8 of them, which made them somewhere between a small combo and bigband, an interesting lineup to me) contributed a piece (new composition or arrangement) that night. The Chick Corea piece I like the most that night was "Crystal Silence", a ballad. It has been a refreshing musical experience for my sister, an aspiring pianist herself. In fact, she was so inspired that she went to Hiromi trio's concert after she went back (Hiromi played at SFJAZZ before flying there! What a coincidence :) She's definitely one of the most exciting young talent (and pianist) today.)
Also worthy to mention was the dinner before the concert: we had it at "Off the Grid," a food truck event at Fort Mason. We had pork puns from Koja (a truck that fused Korean and Japanese food) and The Chairman (I wrote about this truck before) And a Kalifornia Kölsch (beer) Pretty good food and even better atmosphere!
Another fun thing we did was hitting all these different coffee shops in the Peninsula 'coz my sis was also an aspiring coffee connoisseur. Check out her journal of her coffee experience during this visit!
Then we did something really healthy: playing badminton together. We haven't done it for maybe 30 years! Still remember the wooden rackets we used in those days.
Almost every time she visited, we would go to wineries. No exception this time and we picked a great day (Monday) to go to Napa. First we stopped in downtown for a lunch at Morimoto. She saw the restaurant and took a picture of it last time so it's a natural choice this time around. The famous bone marrow justified its fame. The other dishes we got were good too, including a wagyu beef wrap. The wrapper was edible rice paper which made it even more interesting. Another place we missed last time was Bouchon Bakery 'coz the line was so long but it's surprisingly short on a Monday. So we all got macarons (actually I shared an eclair too) which are very reasonably priced because of their huge sizes. Enough about eateries, the wineries we visited included Chandon (a pretty surrounding), Opus One (classy looking. Can't believe my sis hasn't been there before), Groth (interesting architecture - Mission style), Paraduxx (we did a tasting here and was very impressed by the high quality), and last but not least, Alpha Omega (our good friend is a member and made an appointment for outdoor tasting for us there. Awesome wine and view!) We were back to the City after a relatively smooth drive. Still, we barely made it to the happy hour at Hog Island at the Ferry Building (yes, long line there. Lots of people went after work I suppose) We had a few dozen of oysters, their unique clam chowder soup that was served with real clams still in the shells, and of course good beer (Racer 5 IPA)
On the last day of her trip, we're back to SF again. No luck with the Golden Gate Bakery of egg tart fame which has been in a loooong vacation. The main thing I wanna took her to was the noon time concerts that occurs every Tuesday at the cozy Old St. Mary's Cathedral. Coincidentally, a warhorse of the violin repertoire, Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, was performed that day. It was a superb performance.
Then we headed to the shopping area and visited her type of store: the trendy UNIQLO clothing store, and my type of stores: the artsy Lomography store and the smelly Rasputin music store. The other Lomography store I've been to before was the one in the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and fittingly the Lomography movement was started there (the society that promotes event for the community is headquartered in Vienna and the camera distributor/trademark owner is also in Austria) So, what is Lomography all about? Basically it's a community of photographers that advocate creative and experimental film photography. To me, the most important and interesting aspect is spontaneity and de-emphasizing traditional techniques. A few of my friends have done a lot of that on FB, not with film though. I definitely enjoy looking at the photo displayed in the stores. In fact, I read a travel guide to HK using Lomographic photo and the photo fitted very nicely in the book. Well, as far as actually doing it, it's not really for a lazy guy like me as the films needed to be developed. I didn't actually shoot much pic before the digital era. I did spend some money at Rasputin, $6 on vinyl including Crystal Silence by Chick Corea/Gary Burton (inspired by the SFJAZZ performance obviously) and a Bach album by renowned classical guitarist Christopher Parkening.
The main event of that night was Pharoah Sanders Quartet playing at Yoshi's SF. I have seen his group performed Yoshi's Oakland many years before and enjoyed his music a lot. Even though he was often promoted as a collaborator of Coltrane and you could easily hear Coltrane's influence (well, everybody was influenced by Coltrane!), nowadays Sanders play fairly accessible yet refreshing sounding jazz. The amount of energy from this senior musician was unbelievable.
Saturday was reserved for an all-day bike ride (well, not quite, only on the saddle for 6+ hours) at Mt. Diablo (from Danville to the summit, and down north to Walnut Creek, through Clayton and Morgan Territory and loop back to Danville) 65 miles in total. It's kinda scary (steep downhill and the no man's land) but I'm also proud of riding it all by myself!
It was admission-free day at the Asian Art Museum the next day. Of course I won't miss it! The line was much longer than expected though: it was 3 block long when I arrived 20 minutes after the museum was opened. The museum was heavily promoting the Qin terracotta warrior exhibition which was NOT free but fortunately I wasn't too interested (In fact, I found it amusing that stores sell real-life size statue for garden decoration. Don't people know they were for accompanying the dead?) There were plenty to keep me busy anyway, including the South Asian part (mainly Buddhism and Hinduism from India, which I never had time to explore much of them) I always get something different from the art after reading more Buddhism and religion-related literature. As usual, I spent some time on Chinese painting. This time I paid more attention to the works from the Lingnan school (some Lingnan masters lived in HK after the war) And there was another exhibit dedicated to Chinese painters near our time. Those were artists/teachers immigrated to the States in the last century. They have not only used Western technique but also Western subjects (like the family of then US president)
I wish I had more time to spend at the museum but there was an interesting concert from the San Francisco Symphony's Chamber Series, which featured musicians from the orchestra and a program of unfamiliar works from familiar composers (Bruch, Amy Beach and Hindemith) As a violist myself, I especially enjoyed the appearance of the usually under-represented/appreciated instrument. In fact, Hindemith himself was a violist and he wrote the Octet featuring 2 violists in which he intended to play and showed off a little bit. The yet more unusual moment happened during the Bruch's trio pieces: the clarinetist couldn't flip his sheet music to the right page and the trio had to stop and started over. I was really puzzled and thanks to this review by San Francisco Classical Voice, I found out the confusion was likely caused by not all 8 pieces written by Bruch was performed. Nevertheless, it was a very enjoyable performance.
Finally, the "break" was over after attending jazz pianist Vijay Iyer's talk at Stanford, which I'll write in a separate post. (Yes, this has been a loooong post, which explained why my blog was not updated for over a week!)
