North Beach Jazz Fest is off, Rebirth Brass Band is on, and I'm South-bound

North Beach will be without a jazz fest this year, according to financially
strapped organizers. Image by Khaosaming via Wikimedia Commons.

According to the folks who put on the annual North Beach Jazz Fest, which features a weekend of free outdoor music in the San Francisco 'hood, the event won't take place this summer. Here's part of this week's announcement:

This annual tradition, which has been enjoyed by thousands of music fans from around the world for 14 years, will be taking a one-year hiatus for financial reasons.

The one-year pause will give festival organizers Sunset Promotions the necessary time to reorganize and re-launch the event on a more sustainable model.

The festival has become increasingly more costly since 2005, when the producers changed the configuration in Washington Square Park to appease a minority who opposed alcohol sales.

The new configuration cost an average of 40 percent more to produce, while revenues have not kept pace. In addition, the Recreation and Park Commission has recently increased their fee requirements to meet massive budget deficits.

"It's really heartbreaking that we couldn't find a way to make it happen, especially because this event means so much to so many," said co-director Robert Kowal. "But it's one thing to work for six months to break even, and another to know you are going to get hurt. Last year the balance tipped too far to the negative."

Organizers plan to relaunch the event next summer. In the meantime, they will host fundraiser concerts with festival mainstay the Rebirth Brass Band on July 24 and 25 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, to offset losses last year. Tickets are here.

This all is a shame, of course, and follows the failure of national magazine JazzTimes in today's economic climate, which I wrote about recently.

A few years back, I interviewed the man behind the North Beach festival, his love of New Orleans brass band music, and the financial challenges facing the fest:

"New Orleans is a perfect storm of culture," said Robbie Kowal, 33, of Sunset Promotions, which puts on the annual celebration of North Beach's Beat-era jazz legacy. "You have this absolutely unique and vibrant jazz-funk scene. Before Katrina, there were 50 brass bands."

Kowal lived in New Orleans for six years, studying at Tulane University and soaking up local culture. He'd catch up to four or five brass band shows a week and eventually helped produce the city's Jazz and Heritage Festival.

"You're talking about bands that were playing in little clubs, little bars on a Sunday afternoon -- neighborhood bands," he said. "It was a very precious and fragile culture. Now that those neighborhoods are destroyed, it's even more precious."

Although they don't compare in scale, problems that North Beach festival organizers dealt with this year threatened the local institution as well.

Facing a budget crunch, San Francisco ratcheted up fees for outdoor events, Kowal said, including a $20,000 jump for police services. The city's Recreation and Park Department also threatened to cut off the sale of alcohol at the free-admission shows, which Kowal said would have ended them.

But an outpouring of support helped sway officials to work with Sunset to make the fest happen. No outside booze is allowed this year, and no hard liquor will be sold -- but the show goes on.

Baton Rouge's downtown skyline clings to the Mississippi mud.
With the Golden State's economy in turmoil, this writer will depart
for Louisiana's capital city for crawfish, zydeco and employment.

Well, that was then. Hard times got harder, and good times now seem fewer and farther between. The so-called Golden State's unstoppable deflating economy has driven this writer, coincidentally, to the fertile earth that spawned jazz in the first place, Louisiana.

Having been laid off by the Oakland Tribune company a full year ago (they're ready to fire even more reporters, by the way) and relying on sporadic freelance gigs since, I'll be working for the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report to chronicle far better fiscal circumstances, such as a mere $1 billion budget deficit compared with California's $24 billion black hole, and actual job growth. Per the daily paper in Baton Rouge:

In May, Louisiana lost 3,700 jobs -- the third time in five months the state has seen employment losses this year -- and the state now rests 15,700 jobs below a year ago, a further sign that the national recession is affecting the state.

Baton Rouge bucked the downward trend, gaining 300 jobs from April to May, with total employment up 1,300 jobs from a year ago to 376,000. That makes it the only metropolitan area in Louisiana to post both monthly and annual jobs gains.

Or, as my new employer set the scene in a recent column:

While much of the rest of the nation continues to struggle with a tough economy and job losses, Louisiana and its capital city seem blessed. We are bucking the trend seen across the country.

Gov. Bobby Jindal and Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret have laid the foundation, reduced taxes, assembled a team, put training programs in place, used the megafund wisely, negotiated with integrity and worked relentlessly to get the job done. And Louisiana and its people are the winners.

That kind of news should make Jindal's likely bid to oust Obama from the White House a sweet story to be in town for. I bet the Republican's recent speaking hiccup will be all but forgot by then.

By the way, if you want to come and visit, there should be plenty to do besides read about business in the land of Louis, including eating delectable crawfish dishes and swinging out to Cajun and zydeco music.

If you don't want to make the trek, though, there's plenty of that to be found in the Bay Area. A calendar of local Cajun-zydeco dances is here, and you can't go wrong with my favorite Louisiana-themed local eateries, Angeline's in Berkeley and CreoLa in San Carlos. Bon temps, y'all.

Further cementing the Louisiana-Bay Area connection is a nonprofit called For the Bayou, which raises awareness of coastal destruction along the Gulf. The group partnered with Sunset Promotions for an event July 19 in North Beach, featuring Swedish expat and New Orleans musician Anders Osborne. Get the lowdown here.

For more info: Read more on the plight of the North Beach Jazz Fest. Get amped for those Rebirth Brass Band concerts. Check out my post-Katrina feature story on Rebirth and the band's recurring role at the North Beach fest, and check out my profile of CreoLa's chef and owner, Edwin Caba.

My other blog on Examiner.com has stuff to read as well. Some of it is even different from this blog's goodies.

Pizzas are like opinions, everyone has a favorite pie

The perfect food? A homemade pepperoni pizza. PDPhoto.org.

Everybody who sees a "best pizzas" list immediately decries when their favorite pizza place isn't on the menu. Even when the list in question plainly says something like, "Your favorite pizzeria inevitably will not be on the list, sorry."

As with music, one's favorite pizza joint tends to be the one he or she remembers fondly from youth. Such heartfelt allegiance doesn't make a pie automatically great cuisine or even universally tasty, though -- it just means we all love recalling those carefree days of scarfing down 'za and buzzing to pop tones of yesteryear.

I'm not the only one who thinks so. A commenter had this to say about a blog review of Pizzeria Bianco, a Chicago-style place in Phoenix (I'll bring this around to Bay Area pies in a minute.):

You are absolutely right when you say, "This is not my favorite style of pizza," but the fact that no other pizza on earth has ingredients of comparable quality should be enough to say that IT IS the very best in the world. If it failed short in that very important factor of reminding you of the pizzas you ate as a child, it's only a reflection of the poor pizzas you used to eat.

Face it, children do not have refined taste in food or instinctively critical palates. They will eat any processed fast-food garbage you put in front of them with enough hot oil, butter, salt and/or sugar to saturate the chow with addictive chemical flavors. Common sense.

That much I'll say in defense of writer Alan Richman's recent GQ article American Pie, ostensibly on the 25 best pizza places in the country.

While Richman visited more than 100 ristorantes and sampled more than 300 pizzas, he could not partake in everyone's favorite local pizza-pasta spot, of course. Instead, with an eye (tongue?) toward nouveau cooking in keeping with the magazine's style-bible mission, he investigated both age-old traditions and provocative trends in the cuisine.

Earning a place on the list were three San Francisco pizza places, likely none of them your favorite local pie maker (perhaps Zachary's in Berkeley or Oakland, or Little Star in the Mission District or Western Addition -- both thriving, Chicago-themed joints).

Richman put Pizzeria Delfina at No. 3 for its "panna pie," a frugal purchase that includes heavy cream in the recipe. As he wrote:

If you think about the Italian evolution of cheese for pizza -- mozzarella becoming fresh mozzarella and then becoming fresh buffalo-milk mozzarella, each one richer and milkier than the one before -- heavy cream is the natural expression of where Italians intend to go.

He put Gialina at No. 14 for its "wild-nettle pie," made with pancetta (unsmoked bacon) and provolone. "My friend said the wild nettles reminded her of newly mown artichokes, a lovely if implausible image," Richman wrote.

He put A16 at No. 17 for its "romana pie," which he seemed conflicted about for its anchovies (chopped are OK, whole are not, apparently) and olives (big ones are bad, French Nicoise are fine).

Of the general pizza trajectory in The City, he said:

In San Francisco, the heartland of innovative toppings, I found fresh thyme instead of dried oregano, Taleggio and Fontina cheeses instead of mozzarella (it’s my belief that getting beyond mozzarella sets a pizzamaker free), and a basil chiffonade instead of basil leaves. A pause here to reflect on the misuse of fresh basil by Italians. They seem to think of it as decorative rather than flavorful, and they spread not nearly enough of it on their fabled-but-flawed Margherita pies.

Also, he noted the phenomenon of "Indian pizza in San Francisco (pretty good, although reheated chicken dries out badly, despite the tikka masala sauce)."

Without fail, people immediately sliced at Richman through various online venues with a metaphoric pizza cutter for, yes, not including their favorite pizza places. I have a feeling many of them didn't even finish the article, instead scanning through the list and quickly firing off angry counter-opinions.

In my hometown of Chicago, where pizza is king (please don't tell me how great East Coast greasy cardboard is compared with Windy City deep-dish), a newspaper blog celebrated North Side spot Great Lake pizzeria's topping the list, opening the door for commenters to complain about mediocre Chicago places such as Gino's being left out.

Among the more colorful and incisive comments:

'Cuse me? Vito & Nicks? Hey? Don't be afraid, Mr. GQ guy, of da South Side! Vito & Nick's ain't pretty -- not GQ pretty-- but their pie is.
Posted by: Jake Braekes

The very best pizza..... wait for it.................. Are the ones you MAKE AT HOME!!! We've been perfecting our recipe for 4 years now. We can make a whole pie for about $5.00. you use that thing in your kitchen that gets hot when you turn the knobs on the front. (Plus no 10% stroger/daley tax)
Posted by: ryan greene

Gabio's owner Andy Sidell's better half, Griselda,
shows off a trademark Chicago-style deep dish.

Being a native Chicagoan, I have a warm place in my heart for Lou Malnati's deep-dish pizza, which I get shipped frozen to my door in California but that honestly isn't that fantastic, and Wayne's Pizza, a truly typical takeout spot that simply was close to home and became a tradition out of convenience.

Gotta love those stubby corner pieces, though (a sprawling pie is cut in a grid pattern rather than in long, triangular slices, so you wind up with four crispy edge-bits and a lot of gooey squares).

My dad preferred Jake's Pizza in the next town over, but that's just more of the same cookie-cutter, thin-crust stuff.

By the way, Richman had some ambivalence about Arizona pizza, where coincidentally a high school acquaintance of mine set up a Chicago-style pizza/Italian beef/etc. emporium called Gabio's.

As the GQ article said, regarding the so-called seven types of U.S. pizza:

Finally and most wonderfully comes the American pie, actually a recent phenomenon, probably invented by and certainly popularized by Chris Bianco, the godfather of American pizza, who opened Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix in 1994. The pie he prepares and that others emulate is as much about bread-baking as it is about crust-making ... identified by two vital, distinct, and non-Italian elements: a golden glow and a chewy yet velvety interior.

On the other hand, Richman wrote:

Pizza has become the gourmet food of the recession, and the men who create these pies consider themselves artists -- narcissistic, reclusive artists, at that. These guys find multiple ways of being annoying. At Pizzeria Bianco, a friend and I ordered four pies that we shared with the people who had stood in line with us for more than an hour. Still hungry, I tried to order a fifth, but I was cut off like a roaring drunk in an American Legion hall, told that I had reached my limit.

Most brutally, he said:

I traveled to 10 American cities, the ones I knew had a lot of pizzerias or a lot of Italians. They seem to go together, although less so anymore. Phoenix was easy -- there's precisely one pizzeria, Bianco, that anybody recognizes as worth visiting. I would happily have broken my rule and gone to any other personal favorite -- but nobody had one.

Technically, my high school bud Andy Sidell set up pizza shop in Scottsdale, but that's a harsh indictment of Arizona 'za, right? Here's Sidell's response to the smackdown, summarizing many East Coast pizza fans' feelings:

As Pizzeria Bianco is concerned, it isn't "real" pizza. I call it "foo foo" pizza. More closely related to a California Pizza Kitchen-type pizza or pie.

Pizza in my mind, and I think I can vouch for a lot of Chicagoans and New Yorkers, should be loaded with cheese, meats, some veggies or any combination of the three. Pizzas with goat cheese or "Buffalo cheese," as in the article, would be shunned by people from the two big pizza "empires" (Chicago and N.Y.).

Arizona offers a wide variety of pizzerias that produce an incredible pizza that makes people feel like they are back home. I have had several customers tell me that my pizza is better than some of the pizzerias in Chicago.

The way you make the product, and the ingredients you use, help to create an "authentic" Chicago-style or N.Y.-style pizza.

Oh, snap, so-called style magazine. Take dat dere.

For more info: Savor the entire GQ article here, and hurl epithets in honor of your local pizza place's exclusion on the writer's blog. Locate a South Bay pizza place on Yelp (good luck with that). Check out a genuine Chicago-bred lunch menu here. For a completely different take on Chicago-style pizza in Arizona, if that's your thing, check this out.

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My blog on Examiner.com is another fount of wisdom.