Babette’s back patio is West Berkeley’s most recent tunes venue
Update: The preliminary efficiency scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 6, in Babette’s new again patio new music series has been canceled.
Audio was not on the menu when Joan Ellis and Patrick Hooker reopened Babette very last year in the San Pablo Avenue place extended occupied by Lanesplitter Pizza. But more than the training course of the summer season, the again patio has turned into an al fresco venue, with a century-spanning array of jazz manifesting underneath a giant, prehistoric-hunting staghorn fern.
The to start with foothold was established by The Easy Winners, a ragtime-motivated duo with an expansive repertoire of convert-of-the-19th-century tunes. They approached the proprietors about a typical gig, and they’ve been serenading Friday brunchers ever due to the fact. Not extended afterwards Ellis and Hooker happened to listen to Berkeley Superior drummer Flora Sullivan top a combo “and they have been wonderful,” Ellis mentioned. “We spoke to her and they’ve been playing Saturdays or Sundays the previous two months or so.”
Now Babette’s musical feast is growing to regionally sourced evening fare, with Wednesdays that includes a prix fixe menu and a regular residency series that kicks off Sept. 6 with the duo of Berkeley violinist Irene Sazer and Gary Muszynski on hand pan and percussion. A learn improviser whose vast-ranging musical travels have taken her from Turtle Island String Quartet to her Actual Vocal String Quartet, Sazer attracts on all the things from bluegrass and Brazilian choro to bebop, Bach and further than. She’s showcasing a extensive swath of her musical terrain at Babette.
With Muszynski, one more observed musical traveler, she’ll be playing meditative improvisations. On Sept. 13, Sazer will be joined by Berkeley string expert Erik Pearson on guitar and banjo, participating in outdated-time audio and improvisations encouraged by their love of West African rhythms and other idioms. Berkeley flutist Jane Lenoir, a founding member of the Berkeley Choro Ensemble, plays a system of Baroque and Brazilian music with Sazer Sept. 20. She closes the operate Sept. 27 with San Francisco violinist Kate Stenberg, a longtime companion in improvisation and musical exploration.
In yet another scheduling coup, Berkeley clarinetist Ben Goldberg is on faucet for October, as Ellis and Hooker hope to increase targeted visitors throughout a customarily sluggish night time. “It’s an experiment,” Ellis claimed. “We can dwell vicariously and generate anything specific.”
The vicarious pleasure derived from presenting some of the region’s most esteemed musicians stems from their possess musical backgrounds. Ellis used several years as an aspiring singer who “tried on a whole lot of different hats” even though wending her way from folk new music to punk bands to jazzy blues (or bluesy jazz), “but never realized how to make a vocation of it,” she mentioned.
Hooker was a guitarist and bassist who played in Last Rites, a heavy metal band from Dallas that done widely. “I nonetheless really don’t like metal and hardly ever have, but he’s occur all around to my style,” she mentioned, noting that they ended up functioning out a established of tracks to carry out jointly. But that was just before they opened Babette in 2012, an all-consuming endeavor that required them to set their personal audio aside.
“With this attractive area of our possess I got this strategy that we could be presenting the group one thing actually great,” Ellis reported. “Irene is an old pal — our youngsters went to faculty alongside one another — and she came by one day to check out the acoustics. Immediately after wondering about it for a handful of days she got back again to me and mentioned, ‘What if I begun out and experienced a diverse duet lover each and every week,’ which sounded great. It all fell alongside one another truly promptly.”