Just in from the Back Room…They are experimenting with Faye Carol performing every Sunday at 5pm. Join them to listen to one of the finest jazz singers who is a great entertainer with warmth and a voice you can’t help but fall in love with.
Faye Carol is one of the premier vocalists of her time. Her unique style and gift of connecting with her audience is astonishing. This Bay Area living legend is a recipient of countless awards and honors including:
2014 Bay Area Jazz Hero Award,
2016 City of Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award,
2015 induction into the Oakland Blues Walk of Fame, and
four Cabaret Gold Awards.
After beginning her career with gospel music, Ms. Carol was an integral part of Oakland’s innovative funk scene in the 1960s and later went on to form her own trio. She soon built a reputation as a daringly versatile and consistently creative vocal stylist arranging standards and popular songs in her own unique way.
She has shared the stage with legendary artists such as Albert King, Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, Billy Higgins, Charles Brown, Bobby Hutchinson and Pharaoh Sanders. Now established as a world-class artist at the top of her craft, she continues to dazzle and delight audiences at home and beyond. She will be accompanied by Joe Warner on piano.
“Faye Carol is one of the greatest singers on the planet…There is nobody singing the blues and jazz like she is.” – Charles Brown
(courtesy of The Backroom music event calendar
The Backroom – 1984 Bonita Ave in Downtown Berkeley – books all acoustically-based genres, including Jazz, Blues, Folk, Bluegrass, Americana and more. It’s an intimate, comfortable venue with no food or drink other than water or soft drinks. Adults can BYOB. Local musician Sam Rudin wants to keep the music venue small and comfy with a Steinway grand piano on stage and thrift shop overstuffed chairs below.
Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance or you may buy at the door the day of the show with no service fee. Doors open at 4pm.
Meet Jeff Tauber. We caught up with the windblown saxophonist on the rocky shore of the Berkeley Marina where he was playing for birds (mostly seagulls, he jokes), kiteboarders and sailors. He’s been playing for this esteemed marina audience for years. We first heard Tauber play at Birdland Jazz in Oakland where he performed a 3-hour-one-man-show chronicling classic Jazz of the last few decades. He plays a sort of bluesy, cool, often very danceable Jazz.
Tauber recounts that he finished law school and passed the BAR in the early 70s and then toured Africa and Asia for a year and a half. “It gave me a focus. One thing I wanted to do was to learn to play music.” And he did. His musical influences to this day have African and Blues roots.
At first he started playing guitar. “And then I had this epiphany,” he recalls. “I was in San Andrés- an island off of Nicaragua – and had a harmonica with me and it started to play itself.” He said he first started playing music he remembered from his childhood – like the choral movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He improved slowly and started to play semi-seriously around the Bay area. While driving to work as a public defender, he shifted with one hand and played harmonica with the other.
At Berkeley Square he played with Lee Harris’ quartet with Lee on piano, English Pepper on Bass, Kenny Herera on Tenor Sax and Teddy Winston on drums. The group played 40s and 50s Blues & Swing. “They’d get up to six or seven horns on stage and I’d be jamming with them. Kenny, who played sax, one day said to me, ‘Jeff, why don’t you get rid of that toy and get yourself a real horn.’” So Tauber went down to the Marc Silber’s Music Store on Shattuck Ave. and bought an alto sax. And that’s how it began. “The best way to learn to play is to play. So I started playing the horn.”
He had the fortune to find a great studio on a creek near Claremont Ave. No one bothered him. He says he moved from alto to tenor sax pretty quickly. He was working for himself as an attorney then, trying cases and he said he needed the horn. “Being responsible for someone’s life was heavy and the horn was a way to escape it.”
The Blues scene was happening in the East Bay in the 80s with a dozen or so clubs dedicated to the Blues. “It was very open – that community – they let you play. These are folks whose family and friends really showed me a lot of love, tolerance and respect.”
Jeff Tauber on San Francisco Bay, Aug., 2016 – Photo/James Lerager
And that’s when he met Ronnie Stewart, Founder of the West Coast Blues Society and leader of the West Coast Blues Band. He has played with Ronnie over the last 30 years. Haskel Cool Papa Sadler was their mentor in the beginning. These were the days when Mark Hummel was belting blues harmonica at Larry Blake’s in Berkeley, Johnny Nitro was jamming all over SF and JJ Malone and Troyce Keys were Kings of the Blues at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland.
“Popular then was the Deluxe Inn on Union St. in West Oakland. It was the real thing–Sonny Rhodes started playing at midnight and played until 6am. (Rhodes still plays at Biscuit & Blues in SF.) That’s where Jeff really learned about the Blues. “In West Oakland Slim Jenkins and a host of other Blues venues had been the center of the Bay Area Blues scene, but they were all destroyed when they built the Post Office.” That was the beginning of the decline of the East Bay Blues scene. Ever since then, Ronnie Stewart and the West Coast Blues Society have been striving to honor Oakland’s Blues roots and bring Blues back to West Oakland, starting with the Blues Walk of Fame.
In the mid 80s Tauber started to play African Music. In 1985 Tauber was recruited to play with a band called Hedzoleh Soundz, a major West African Band, then touring the US with Hugh Masakellah. “I moved from Blues to African and World Beat music and ended up also managing the band.” He played locally and would also drive down to Santa Cruz or up to Mendocino to play for African music starved fans. “Being in that community – the people were living by a different standard where they might make $20-30/night playing music – was a very important experience for me. It gave me a door or window into a different life.”
For the past twenty-five years Jeff has been a Criminal Courts Trial Judge, when not in Washington DC or traveling around the nation and the world as founding president and President Emeritus of National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP). His great passion has been the development of Community-Based court rehabilitation systems.
More recently, Jeff has been devoting his musical talents to recreating a unique jazz sound. “For the last year I have been playing with a Hammond organ player, Craig Browning, who is a marvel (and sometimes with a drummer). We play two to three gigs a month. We try to play the Great American Song Book, the soulful spirit of the original jazz interpreters, using soft melodic and lyrical arrangements, rather than more modern technical approaches.”
Even so, modern technology and multimedia have had a positive influence on him. Tauber says he can easily learn new songs with the iReal Pro app, which provides Jazz tunes that you can set the rhythm, key and style. “I can learn much more when I hear the chords.”
At a recent gig, Jeff Tauber packed the house with his one-man show, For the Birds at Birdland Jazzista Social Club in Oakland. About one hundred people listened and danced to jazz favorites from the last few decades over the course of a three-hour show. Tauber played tenor sax over his pre-recorded app– a last minute solution to his piano man’s cancellation. He introduced the tunes, ranging from the 1920’s to today, sharing some history of each song with his usual warmth and humor.
Behind him, projected on a screen, flew photos of the birds he plays to almost daily when he practices at the Berkeley or Richmond marinas. He told the crowd “…they seem to like it.” The birds like it and so did we.
If you like Blues, Jazz, Funk, or R&B, check out Tauber’s list of clubs along the east shore of the San Francisco Bay or find his gigs on Facebook.
You can also catch him playing at BIRDLAND JAZZISTA SOCIAL CLUB (4318 Martin Luther King Way in Oakland), on Sat., Oct. 15, from 8 to 11pm or to the birds on the Bay in Berkeley or Richmond.
Skates on the Bay’s Mixologist Rob McCarthy has concocted four new cocktails for your summertime bliss, including one made with seasonal basil and others with bitters or citrus.
Amerafine – Campari, housemade vermouth, celery bitters & soda
Lower East Side – Woodford Rye, housemade vermouth, rhubarb bitters
Dismantled H2O Melon Punch – St. George Botanivore gin, elderflower liqueur, lemon juice, 5 spice
Tortuga – Mt. Gay rum, lime juice, brown sugar-basil syrup
Summer Beer: Hailing from Portland, OR, Widmer Hefe Shandy Seasonal Ale – the original American hefeweizen gets a bold new citrusy aroma and flavor from lemon drop hops and natural lemonade flavor
Summer Wine: Bieler Pere et Fils Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence ‘Sabine’ Rose – aromas and flavors from savory lavender and rosemary to rose petal notesto citrus, wild raspberry and tart cherries
How does Rob come up with these cocktails?
“Crafting cocktails is all about knowing which techniques to use, and when to use them. Do I over caramelize the sugar in the house vermouth or do I add more bittering agents to bring out the flavor profile that I want.
“The most important thing is that I am in complete control of each ingredient and how it tastes in order to impart the final profile that I am after.
But where do the ideas for a new a cocktail come from? Rob says that sometimes a sensational meal inspires him to create a drink to pair with it. Or sometimes there is a happy accident that makes the cut.
“Sometimes I learn a new technique or come across a new ingredient and find several ways to exploit them. For instance, when I learned how to make vermouth I also made several different ones with completely different profiles and a drink or two for each one. ” Happy mixing, Rob.
If you were following the story of Mixologist Meets Botanist at Skates on the Bay, you will want to know about the splash of Spring Cocktails Skates is currently featuring:
· Lavender Collins – Hangar 1 vodka, distilled locally in Alameda, Giffard Crème de Violette and their house-crafted lavender syrup. This is a wonderful twist on a traditional “poolside” – or in this case “bayside” – drink. Enjoy a slight sweetness with just the right amount of lavender to make it unique to the palette, yet still maintain a nice balance.
· Parasol-Lillet Blanc – St. Germain elderflower liqueur, house-crafted honey syrup and Ruffino Prosecco. For folks who enjoy the bubbly, this is a smooth, slightly herbaceous spring, sipping cocktail.
· Robin’s Nest – Hendricks gin, Giffard Crème de Violette, lemon juice and house-crafted maraschino syrup. Mixologist Rob McCarthy spends a lot of time fine tuning ingredients so they balance and complement one another. With the Robin’s Nest you get the distinct flavor of gin rounded out on the end with the juicy richness of maraschino cherries and lavender. It’s a great combination of unusual elements.
· Young Man’s Game – Bulleit 95 Rye, Dubonet, Cointreau and Peychaud bitters. This is a drink for those ladies and gentlemen who like a little “mmph” in their adult beverage. If you haven’t experienced rye, this would be a fantastic introduction.
Stay tuned for the new cocktail menu coming out soon!
