Crosscurrents

Don’t mean to overreact and risk boosting everybody’s blood pressure higher than opening offers on Facebook’s IPO, but this might be a halfway decent time to seek out a nice, safe, steel bunker to hunker down in or behind, because it’s awards season and heavy metal statuettes are being tossed around like dimes at a county fair. Like the flurry of résumés from the outer office of Michele Bachmann’s inner circle. As plentiful as the doubts currently circling Mitt Romney’s Super PAC.

Oakland Chinatown’s Pacific Renaissance Plaza opened in 1993. It was a real victory for Chinatown and signaled its change from a Chinese-centric neighborhood to a multicultural and pan-Asian identity.

When musician Eddie Marshall died last fall, he had been on the top rung of Bay Area jazz for more than 40 years. In 2000, he was the first recipient of the prestigious San Francisco Jazz Beacon award for lifetime achievement. Reporter David Ross spoke with Marshall in this piece from our archives.

On a beautiful summer day in a bucolic forest near the San Mateo coast, the sounds of Eddie Marshall’s drum set reverberates off the redwoods at Jazz Camp West, where jazz lovers of all ages go for a week each summer to study with jazz masters.

This band hails from Sacramento, California, near Max Jacobs' home town of Davis. Jacobs remembers driving all the way to San Francisco to see live music in high school. 

BART's new fleet: Made in the USA, but maybe not in California; Remembering legendary Bay Area jazz musician, Eddie Marshall; New YBCA art director strives for creative risks; and local singer KC Turner