Drummer, composer, improviser, and conductor Jordan Glenn spent his formative years in Oregon and, after relocating to the Bay Area in 2006, quickly became active in a variety of music scenes. He has worked closely with Fred Frith, William Winant, Zeena Parkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Myra Melford, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Lisa Mezzacappa, Kyle Bruckmann, Michael Coleman, and the Rova Sax Quartet, among many others.

In addition to composing for dance companies Sharp & Fine and Liss Fain Dance, Glenn writes music that spans the stylistic gamut. His ensemble BEAK is a unique mix of modular composed material, conducted improvisation, and groove. For this program, BEAK is joined by instrument maker Sudhu Tewari and some of his creations made especially for the ensemble.

Nippon Kobo presents contemporary chamber music from Japan and beyond, curated by creative director and percussionist Haruka Fujii. The ensemble features Bay Area artists Ráyo Furuta (flute) and Shota Otaguro (percussion). introducing folk melodies, stories, and compositions from Japan.

Nippon Kobo builds a new community where people meet, learn, and experience cross-cultural dialogue through music concerts paired with contemporary Japanese art and culture. An innovative community of artists, creators, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts from the SF Bay Area to co-create immersive cultural experiences that connect people, contributing to a more multicultural society. Nippon Kobo is a leading destination for musicians to present chamber music in a nontraditional setting. By providing opportunities to collaborate with diverse creative professionals, they expand the possibilities of classical music and strengthen engagement with new audiences.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Sampaguitas sing Filipino folk songs and inspired originals in three-part harmony. Drawing influences from folk, blues, doo-wop girl groups, and the Filipinx-American diaspora, Jenevieve Francisco, Cristina Ibarra, and Aireene Espiritu share music from their roots and explore what it means to be in a “third culture” between worlds. The sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines and only fitting to describe the sweet sounds coming from their melded vocal textures, tones, and tight harmonies.

Espiritu, Francisco, and Ibarra met in San Francisco and connected over their shared ancestry and love of music. Using Filipino folk songs to explore their cultural roots, they found that singing together unlocked a deep connection to each other and to audiences.

What happens when exceptional Bay Area musicians come together to create something new? Founded in March 2025 by violinist Maki Ishii Sowash and pianist Ayaka Isono, Ensemble Humanité is a collaborative chamber music ensemble bringing together musicians from across the Bay Area. Rather than a fixed roster, Ensemble Humanité brings different artists together for each concert.

In its first year, the ensemble has presented programs at Piedmont Center for the Arts, the Santa Cruz Chamber Players concert series, and the San Francisco Public Library’s Hooray for Braille event. With support from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and affiliation with InterMusic SF, Ensemble Humanité is building a community where musicians and audiences meet through the transformative experience of live performance. Extraordinary musicians. Unexpected collaborations. Real human connection.

SixEight: Maclauchlan & Quale is a partnering of longtime friends and collaborators Vincent Maclauchlan (guitar) and Teo Quale (mandolin). The band reaches a wide audience, with their repertoire of bluegrass, jazz, folk/Americana and even classical. The duo has performed with Fantastic Negrito and at various venues and festivals, including the annual San Francisco Festival of the Mandolins. Maclauchlan & Quale recently recorded an album (as yet to be published), produced by Sam Reider.

As a pianist, composer, and bandleader, Anne Sajdera is a creative force whose exhilarating music is an emotional journey captured in melody, harmony, and rhythm. Known for her burnished lyricism, she relies on her roots in American and Brazilian jazz, and her classical training, to create a genre-blending sound that’s melodically verdant, harmonically sophisticated and rhythmically compelling.

Her recordings feature performances by Airto Moreira and Bob Mintzer. Her performance at SF Music Day will feature Sajdera’s jazz quintet performing her original compositions and highlighting the debut of a work from her newest creative project. Her most recent album, It’s Here (Bijuri Records, 2024), was funded in part by an MGP grant, and the title cut earned a semifinalist rank in the 2025 Unsigned Only Music Awards international music competition.

Always World Class. Always Admission Free! The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra is dedicated to making classical music accessible, inclusive, and enjoyable to audiences of all ages and backgrounds across the Bay Area by providing world-class, admission-free concerts and educational programming. Led by Music Director Jory Fankuchen and Executive Director Darcy Rindt, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra is a fully professional, tightly-knit ensemble of Bay Area musicians. Typically, 25 to 35 players come together onstage.

SFCO’s MainStage Concerts in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto feature newly commissioned works, beloved classics, and outstanding soloists, designed to appeal to seasoned concertgoers and those new to classical music. The SFCO also presents Family Concerts, including Sensory Friendly offerings for our neurodivergent community, as well as Very First Concerts for our littlest fans.

Rova: a group that can move listeners the way an Eastern European choir of voices can move them, but also—if musically called for—a band that can generate a sound force that feels as if it’s tearing the walls of the listening space down, or can express one of nature’s wild phenomena, or conversely, the almost-silent overlapping sound-patterns heard with eyes closed in a field in the wilderness. Since 1978: dealing it, and surprising listeners worldwide.

Rova’s 49th season: SF Music Day, Oct. 25. Their new CD, THOSE WHO…, will be available on ESP-Disk, and their set will focus on pieces from it. They Live Here. They Work Here. They hope audiences will finally come and see—and hear them LIVE—and for free, at SF Music Day.

Trumpeter and composer Ian Carey’s Wood Metal Plastic is a chamber jazz septet featuring dense contrapuntal textures, lush harmonies, and freewheeling improvisation. The 7-piece group features stellar San Francisco Bay Area musicians and tackles Carey’s intricate compositions, which bridge chamber music, straightahead jazz, and free improvisation, ranging from lush harmonies and counterpoint to spiky modernism.

The SF Music Day program will include music composed for its debut album Strange Arts (2024), exploring aesthetic connections between Carey’s music and the eclectic creations of his father, visual artist Philip Carey, and their shared fascination with density of detail and where the organic world meets the artificial. Carey has been active in the Bay Area creative music scene since 2001 and received commissions from Chamber Music America and InterMusic SF.

Marielle V Jakobsons is a composer, violinist, and electronic musician whose music brings together the warmth of acoustic instruments with the expansive possibilities of electronic sound. Her work combines violin, Fender Rhodes piano, synthesizers, and layered textures to create music that is immersive, luminous, and full of unexpected turns.

Her latest album, The Patterns Lost to Air (Thrill Jockey, 2026), moves between hypnotic rhythms, shimmering electronics, intricate melodies, and passages. AllMusic calls it her “richest, most melodic, and most sonically detailed work to date.” For SF Music Day, Jakobsons performs music from The Patterns Lost to Air on violin and electronics, accompanied by keyboardist David Wesley Golightly. Together, they bring the album’s atmospheric sound world into a live setting, where composed music and improvisation meet.

The father and son Pawlik-Zwiebel Duo has been making music together since Ariel started playing violin at age six. The duo has ‘grown up’ and performs professionally across the United States and Europe. Pianist Markus Pawlik has led an international career as a soloist, recitalist, and recording artist since winning the Eurovision classical competition. Violinist Ariel Pawlik-Zwiebel (19) has been a top prize winner, concertmaster and soloist while growing up in the Bay Area.

Recent Duo engagements include the Musikalischer Sommer Ostfriesland Festival, Piano Salon Christophori in Berlin, San Francisco International Piano Festival with Noontime Concerts, and recitals in Geneva, Bremen, Phoenix, Berkeley, and San Rafael. The duo draws on their German and American nationalities and Eastern European ancestry to find inspiration for their programs.

Raffi Garabedian is a tenor saxophonist and composer living in Oakland, California. A dedicated improvisationalist, he utilizes spontaneous composition to create sonic atmospheres in which different perspectives on rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic progression can take shape. His compositional work remains informed by his relationship with improvisation.

His second record, Melodies in Silence, was a record in part of grief and loneliness, marked by the remote nature of its recording, which opened new avenues in terms of production and processing. On 2024’s The Crazy Dog, Garabedian began writing for voice as part of a cross-generational effort to bring his own, his father’s, and his grandmother’s voices into one piece of art. Downbeat calls the result a “deeply personal and musically inventive” work with “complex, contrapuntal ambitions.”

Sundra Manning is a Pianist, Keyboardist, Hammond B3 Organ Player, Artist, Educator, Composer and Producer. A graduate of SFSU with two B.A. Degrees in Economics and Broadcasting/Studio Production, she is highly respected for her wide-ranging musical versatility and joyful performances. Her performances continue to inspire listeners, writers, and performers around the world, making her a sought-after performer and educator.

Sundra has recorded, written, and performed around the world with Larry Graham featuring Prince, Lalah Hathaway, Raphael Saadiq, Bobby Womack, Ledisi, Michael Franti & Spearhead, and Pete Escovedo. She is an active music educator working with Living Jazz – Jazz/Jam Camp West, 510akland, Jazz & Democracy, and SFJAZZ, and most recently served as a Blues Piano Instructor for Ryan Coogler’s Warner Bros. 2025 Oscar-nominated film Sinners.

During their 21 years together, Quinteto Latino has disrupted long-standing racial and cultural disparities within the classical music field and driven this change by championing the music of Latina/o/e composers and musicians. They have created educational programs performed for thousands of students across the country and formed a second quintet (the Quinteto Latino Fellows) made up of San Francisco Conservatory graduate students that continues to bring these concerts to children throughout the greater Bay Area.

As a nationally-recognized classical wind ensemble, Quinteto Latino has performed across the US. Their long history of commissioning and premiering works has resulted in cutting-edge new repertoire. In their 22nd and final season, they will perform across the Bay Area and return to New York for a week of performances.

The Dutt Campbell Duo unites the talents and vision of two prominent figures in today’s new music: violist Hank Dutt, who performed with the three-time Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet for nearly 50 years; and pianist Kate Campbell, a current member of the groundbreaking San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the West Coast’s largest and longest-running new music ensemble. The duo is committed to performing new and recent works by living composers, including Mary Kouyoumdjian, Fodé Lassana Diabaté, and Timo Andres, with commissioned works forthcoming from Kouyoumdjian, Missy Mazzoli, and former Kronos cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. They are also ardent supporters of New York’s nonprofit Luna Composition Lab and its alumni. The duo offers singular interpretations of now-classic works by Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Toru Takemitsu, and Benjamin Britten.

Bululú is a Bay Area–based Latin band dedicated to creating original music rooted in the rich traditions of Venezuelan, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and broader Caribbean cultures. As a women-led, Latinx-led, and LGBTQ+-led ensemble, their mission is to amplify the voices, stories, and rhythms of the Latinx community and Latin diaspora through powerful, original compositions that celebrate heritage while advancing equality and social justice.

Comprised of professional musicians from across Latin America and the United States, and proudly majority-female, Bululú represents a transformative presence within the Latin music scene of the SF Bay Area. Their sound spans calypsos, salsa, cumbias, joropo, guarachas, bachatas, and more—each piece an original expression of cultural resilience, celebration and joy. Through their performances, they foster inclusion, pride, and intergenerational dialogue.

Cornelius Boots is a lifelong woodwinder, shakuhachi grandmaster, celebrated composer, and hardcore panstylist. Founder of the world’s only composing bass clarinet quartet, Edmund Welles (1996–2015), Boots returns to SF Music Day with Hermit Jazz: solo woodwind music rooted in rural blues, Zen chant, and riff rock. Performing on bass shakuhachi—a rare, low-pitched, root-end bamboo flute from Japanese Buddhism—he channels decades of devotional practice into 60+ original compositions.

After 20 years in the Bay Area, Cornelius returned to Philadelphia in 2023. Founder of Black Earth Shakuhachi School, he holds three degrees from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, has released over a dozen albums, and performed at World Shakuhachi Festivals and Sony’s E3 2018. His Ghost of Tsushima performance has over 6 million YouTube views.

Acclaimed Bay Area singers Margaret Belton, Meredith Edgar, and Jill Rogers join in a reimagining of the haunting, poetic songs of Gillian Welch. With rich three-part harmonies and full band arrangements, they explore Welch’s emotional songbook. Belton brings theatrical warmth, Edgar adds a noir Americana edge, and Rogers delivers country soul with the clarity and precision of a jazz singer. The blend of their voices is divine.

They’re backed by The Trillianaires – a band featuring Jamie Duncan (Jamie Duncan Quartet, Joe Rut and the Sunshine Shovelers) and Myles Boisen (Angela LaFlamme, Orchestra Nostalgico, Miniwatt String Trio) on guitars and Russell Kiel (Ruby Lee Hill, Joe Rut and the Sunshine Shovelers) on bass, with Steve Pearson (Laura Benitez and the Heartache, Kate Burkhart Band) on drums.