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Around Berkeley
🥔 Artist and culinary historian Carrie Tillie will demonstrate how to carve designs into potatoes to make prints. Stop by anytime from 1-3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21. ACCI Galley. $5 (RSVP)
🚲 Cyclebar Berkeley will offer free indoor cycling classes and other activities like boozy bracelet-making and outdoor yoga as a part of its Free Ride Fest. Cycling class themes range from Afrobeats to Charli XCX; you’ll want to check the website for specific times. Thursday-Sunday, Sept. 19-22. Cyclebar Berkeley. (RSVP required)
✡️ In preparation for the Jewish high holidays, a sacred song circle and concert led by singer/songwriter Eliana Light (with help from Palo Alto-reared cantor Gabriel Lehrman) brings together four singular songstresses, including Coleen Dieker, Chava Mirel and Elana Brody. Thursday, Sept. 19, 7-9 p.m. Urban Adamah. $18-$36
🇨🇴 Emerging from Colombia’s Caribbean coast eight decades ago, the widely traveled Latin Grammy-winning cumbia combo Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto shares a triple bill with Oakland’s Los Bahianatos, a group devoted to accordion-driven Colombian styles, including cumbia, vallenato, música sabanera, and salsa colombiana, and the Bay Area’s La Cumbiamba Colombiana, a lively comparsa focusing on traditional rhythms from the Colombian Caribbean. Thursday, Sept. 19, 8:30 p.m. Ashkenaz. $25-$30
🇮🇷 Created by percussionist Habib Meftah Boushehri, Shibaali is an Afro-Iranian electro-folk project with producer Rouzbeh Esfandarmaz that fuses traditional Persian music with electronic beats. Friday, Sept. 20, 8 p.m. Ashkenaz. $40-$50
🎸 Marked by rich vocal harmonies and dexterous interplay on electric guitar, five-string banjo, mandolin, ukulele, cello banjo, steel drum and many other instruments, Grammy Award-winning musicians Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer play a children’s concert sponsored by the Berkeley Library and Berkeley Old Time Music Convention. Saturday, Sept. 21, 10:15 a.m. Central Library Children’s Room. FREE
🎨 Berkeley Art Center is collaborating with Empowerment Avenue, which supports incarcerated artists and writers, for its latest exhibition, Painting Ourselves into Society, featuring works by current and formerly incarcerated artists. It’s co-curated by artist-activist Orlando Smith, who is serving eight life sentences at San Quentin State Prison, and Oakland writer Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, who previously spent a decade at San Quentin. Saturday, Sept. 21, 2-5 p.m. Berkeley Art Center. FREE (through Jan. 12, 2025)
🏈 The University Of California Straw Hat Band provides a raucous soundtrack for the Cal Bears game against Florida State. Saturday, Sept. 21, 4 p.m. Triple Rock. FREE
🎻 Focusing on music from their gorgeous duo album Sky, San Francisco clarinetist, vocalist and composer Beth Custer and Berkeley-reared, Brooklyn-based guitar star Will Bernard join forces with well-traveled Oakland Symphony violinist Ellen Gronnigen for an evening of lustrous instrumentals, songs and improvisation. Saturday, Sept. 21 7:30 p.m. Hillside Club. $20
🎸 Guitarist Ray Obiedo, a creative catalyst on the Bay Area music scene for five decades as a composer, producer, bandleader and percussive-minded guitarist, performs with his Latin Jazz Project, bringing soulful Caribbean grooves to passersby and witting listeners. Sunday, Sept. 22, 1-3 p.m. Fourth Street at Delaware. FREE
🔔 Los Angeles-based sound meditation practitioner Odeya Nini will lead a vocal workshop and sound bath at BAMPFA. The event is included with the cost of museum admission. Sunday, Sept. 22, 4 p.m. BAMPFA.
🍂 Rabbi David Cooper leads a sunset observance of the autumn equinox marking the changing of the seasons and celebrating the balance of our days. Sunday, Sept. 22, 6:15-7:15 p.m. César Chávez Park, Chávez/Huerta Tribute Site (The Solar Calendar). FREE
🎷 The Back Room’s proprietor and resident pianist Sam Rudin continues his monthly Sam’s Corner series with alto saxophonist Charles McNeal, a former Bay Area resident universally admired for his abundant soul, versatility and scorching tone. Special guest Pamela Rose, a singer who knows her way around the blues, joins the soirée of soul. Sunday, Sept. 22, 7 p.m. The Back Room. $20
📚 Pegasus Books Downtown and UC Press present legendary California oceanographer, author, and UC Santa Cruz Professor Gary Griggs celebrating the launch of his cheerful new book California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State. Tuesday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m. Pegasus Books Downtown. FREE
📚 Margaret Wilkerson Sexton discusses her book On the Roof Top, about a mother’s musical ambitions for her three daughters set during the 1950s in San Francisco’s Fillmore District with Lewis Watts, author of the landmark Fillmore District oral history, Harlem of the West. The event also features a set by Melba’s Kitchen, the formidable all-women jazz ensemble. Wednesday, Sept. 25, 6 p.m. Hillside Club. FREE (registration required)
🎹 Plan ahead: Cal Performances is kicking off its 2024-25 season with the U.S. premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi, an hour-long song cycle for voice and piano that features the Grammy-winning soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, and choreographer-dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. Friday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. $36+ (RSVP)
🎻 Plan ahead: Telegraph Quartet will perform Rebecca Clarke’s Poem for String Quartet, Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 10, and Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major. Until recently, the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition-winning ensemble was the quartet-in-residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; the group is now based at the University of Michigan. Saturday, Sept. 28. 3 p.m. Berkeley Piano Club. $40 (RSVP)
🎶 Plan ahead: the Voices of Silicon Valley choral ensemble will perform two contrasting a cappella works by Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg, who pushed atonal music forward and invented 12-tone music: his romantic Peace on Earth from 1907 and Three Thousand Years from 1950, shortly before he died. A lecture by pianist Jonathan Khuner and composer Cyril Deaconoff will follow. Sunday, Sept. 29, 7 p.m. Hillside Club. $40-$60 (RSVP)
🎧 Plan ahead: Legendary music producer Joe Boyd, who has worked with Nick Drake, R.E.M. and Pink Floyd, will give a talk about his new bookAnd the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. The book, drawn from a decade of travel, research, and listening, explores how events, people and politics in places like Havana, Lagos and Budapest shaped jazz, rhythm, blues and rock ’n’ roll. Monday, Sept. 30, 7 p.m. Mrs. Dalloway’s. FREE (RSVP required)
Beyond Berkeley
📚 Starting this week, the eclectic basement-bookstore-bar Clio’s is hosting a six-week reading group led by scholars from UC Berkeley. How did writers manage to live through dark times throughout history, and what can we learn from their work? This course will help you find out. Thursday, Sept. 19, 5:45 p.m. 353 Grand Avenue, Oakland. $20
🐻 Watch the Cal Golden Bears play against the Florida State Seminoles at Telegraph Avenue’s Kingfish Pub, a historic bait shop-turned-tavern. Mike, the Hot Dog Mayor and hot dog vendor at Oakland Ballers games, will be cooking up some hot and veggie dogs. Saturday, Sept. 21, 3:30 p.m. 5227 Telegraph Ave., Oakland.
🎨 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and artist Minnie Phan will be celebrating the launch of Simone, a picture book about a Vietnamese American girl whose life is transformed by a wildfire. The event is co-hosted by Eastwind Books and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, and a portion of the sales will be donated to Project Immigration Justice for Palestinians. Phan will lead a coloring activity at 12 p.m. and the talk starts at 1 p.m. Admission to the event, previously $10, is now free. Sunday, Sept. 22, 1 p.m. Oakland Asian Cultural Center. (RSVP)
🎤 Plan ahead: A coalition of environmental justice activists from the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal and the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay chapter and other grassroots organizations will gather for From Bhopal to the Bay, an event commemorating the world’s worst industrial disaster: the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster, which killed thousands immediately and exposed hundreds of thousands more to cancer-causing chemicals. Panelists include environmentalists, labor organizers, community and indigenous leaders, scientists, lawyers and artists. Masks are strongly recommended. It’ll take place in downtown Oakland, but you’ll need to RSVP to receive the location. Tickets are sliding-scale and start at $5. Wednesday, Sept. 25, 6 p.m.
If there’s an event you’d like us to consider for this roundup, email us at the-scene@berkeleyside.org. If there’s an event that you’d like to promote on our calendar, you can use the self-submission form on our events page.
The Oaklandside’s Arts and Community reporter Azucena Rasilla contributed to this list.
