Innov Gnawa with Book of J: Yerba Buena Gardens Festival | SF
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Yerba Buena Gardens (Esplanade) | 773 Mission St., San Francisco, CA
Event Details
Submitted by the Event Organizer
SF’s Yerba Buena Gardens Festival 2025
The 2025 Yerba Buena Gardens Festival hosts a full lineup of free outdoor music, theater, circus, dance, poetry, and children’s programs. The Festival opens on Saturday, May 10, 2025 with La Santa Cecilia to kick off its 25th Anniversary Season.
This spiritually charged double bill pairs the black Moroccan ritual trance music of Innov Gnawa with Book of J’s radical Hebraic blues. The Grammy-nominated New York musical collective Innov draws on Fez-born Hassan Ben Jaafer’s treasure trove of musical knowledge brought to Morocco centuries ago by soldiers and slaves from Mali and Mauritania, an incantatory sound that’s enthralled jazz giant Randy Weston, guitar legend Jimmy Hendrix and writer/composer Paul Bowles. Book of J combines Ashkenazi roots music with the Bible-haunted sounds of American traditional music. Featuring Charming Hostess vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg and Sway Machinery guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood, the project paints “an expansive musical landscape encompassing gothic Yiddish songs, Piedmont blues, queer politics and Leonard Cohen covers,” says The New Yorker.
Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.
Cost: FREE
Categories: *Top Pick*, Live Music, Outdoors
