Scott Foster 3rd Fridays residency

About

Guitarist Scott Foster has a long-standing residency on the third Friday of each month. Scott has enjoyed the longest tenure of any musician on the Bird & Beckett bandstand, dating back to the beginnings of our weekly "Jazz in the Bookshop" programming, inaugurated in late 2002 by the late tenor saxophone/flute player/bandleader Chuck Peterson -- a tradition which continues uninterrupted to this day. Scott has had an understated but outsized influence on the shape of jazz in the City in the first quarter of the 21st century. It all started musically in the garage of his parents' suburban house in the far east bay in the early 1980s under the heady influence of punk rock, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana shredding with his high school buddies. Scott took the shards of that musical mayhem with him to Berklee School of Music in Boston. On graduation, he brought some of the associations he made there back to the Bay Area, including his vocalist/pianist/educator wife Roz, his drumming buddy Dan Foltz and others, and developed a fair portion of his adult jazz sensibilities as a gigging professional at a succession of venues through the decades. These venues and gigs have included the San Francisco Brewing Company in North Beach alongside Dan Foltz in the company of saxophonist Jim Peterson; Jazz at Pearls with trumpet players Mike Olmos in the Fil Lorenz Orchestra and Dave Scott and Erik Jekabson as well as Mike in the Composers Jazz Orchestra, which moved down to the old Purple Onion spot that became Doc's Lab when Pearl's closed, with the orchestra soon redubbed the Electric Squeeze Box Orchestra. Also, the Bayview Boat Club down on the waterfront under bassist Don Prell with saxophonists Chuck Peterson, Jerry Logas, Jim Grantham and Smith Dobson, pianists Michael Parsons and Adam Shulman, drummer Ulf Bjorkbom and many others; Concurrently there were gigs at Cafe Claude with trumpeter Darren Johnston and bassist Marcus Shelby and at the Club Deluxe with bassists John Wiitala and Joe Kyle, Jr., bassist/mandolin player/band leader Michael Zisman, drummers Larry Vann, Omar Aran and Cairo McCockran, and saxophonist David Boyce. Along the way, beginning in 2022, Bird & Beckett met Scott when he became a mainstay in Chuck Peterson's trio and quartet, and learned much from Chuck's associates, veteran players including saxophonist/arranger Bill Perkins, saxophonists Ray Loeckle and Howard Dudune, bassists Dean Reilly and Al Obidinski, drummers Jimmy Ryan, Tony Johnson and Ron Marabuto, and vocalist Dorothy Lefkovitz along with her close associates including the guitarist/arranger Henry Irvin, saxophonist Bishop Norman Williams and pianist BJ Papa, as well as Jimmy Ryan's Bird & Beckett Bebop Band players including pianist Don Alberts, trumpeters Henry Hung and Joel Ryan, bassists Bishu Chatterjee and Charles Thomas, and countless others -- a fraction, but a significant one, of San Francisco's contribution to jazz in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. Scott's sense of the guitar was significantly shaped by his encounters with major Northern California players including Eddie Duran. Calvin Keys, Bruce Forman, Jeff Buens, Brad Buethe, Ray Scott, Bob Brumbeloe, Randy Vincent, Duncan James and so many others, and a long the way Scott blossomed as an educator at the San Francisco's Community Music Center and at The Urban School, where he now directs the Performing Arts Department and where as a teacher he developed the nascent talents of numerous players who have made their mark nationally and internationally and make up the fabric of the current jazz scene here, including multi-instrumentalist Sam Reider, pianist/saxophonist/bandleader Ben Slater, vocalist Judy Butterfield, guitarist Luke Schwartz and many more. At Bird & Beckett on the third Friday of each month, Scott conceives and presents a fresh a combo featuring many of the Bay Area's great jazz talents. He's been a consistent presence on our bandstand since October 2002 when Chuck Peterson created what eventually came to be called the 230 Jones Street, Local Six Literary Jazz Band in tribute to the address of the union headquarters where he and his co-conspirators in labor rights for working musicians congregated throughout the 1960s and '70s to screw around and to foment a campaign for dignity for gigging jazz musicians in the clubs, hotel lounges and restaurants, in the theatre district pit orchestras, and the like.