Looking for things to do in the Bay Area this weekend? The Do List has you covered with concerts, festivals, exhibitions, plays, performances and more.
You can listen to this week’s episode with KQED’s Gabe Meline and Sam Lefebvre above, or read about our picks below.
Sister Act: This Whoopi Goldberg-starring film was shot in San Francisco—Noe Valley, to be precise—in 1991. The journalist Peter Hartlaub from the San Francisco Chronicle has spent his past few weeks obsessively finding the exact filming locations of the movie. You won’t recognize a lot of the neighborhood in the movie—the crew even transformed a corner real estate building into an X-rated adult bookstore for the film—but that’s part of the fun. Hartlaub and his colleague Heather Knight host a screening of Sister Act next week, with two opening acts: a bagpipe player, and the official 2019 Cable Car Bell ringing champion. That’s on Thursday, Dec. 5, at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco. Details here.
Pharoah Sanders: This 79-year-old jazz legend is immediately recognizable for his viscerally abrasive, ever-searching style of tenor saxophone, an inimitable voice honed in the Sun Ra Arkestra and John Coltrane ensembles before leading his own groups. As a bandleader in the late 1960s, Sanders continued exploring free and spiritual jazz on a staggering run of albums for the Impulse! label, by turns intoning peace with wounded lyricism and reveling in explosive, anguished intensity. Sanders last played the Bay Area in 2017, part of a program recognizing Coltrane, and returns with the same collaborators—pianist William Henderson, bassist Nat Reeves and drummer Johnathan Blake—for two sets a night on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 29 and 30, at Yoshi’s in Oakland. Details here.
Ghost Ship Memorial: It’s been three years since the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland that took the lives of 36 people at an underground show. Many of them were musicians and artists, and each year, to remember them, there’ve been memorial concerts and special gatherings. The one this Sunday is both: an art show of work by artists who died at Ghost Ship, and a concert by the chamber choral ensemble Voices of Silicon Valley, who will be joined by two bands whose members were close with people who died in the Ghost Ship fire: Abandoned Footwear and Marmot. That’s on Sunday, Dec. 1, at the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in Oakland. Details here.
