Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

The heat is on when Yerba Buena Salsa Nights return to the YBG Festival! Designed to delight salseros, this popular evening series transforms the plaza across from SFMOMA into an open-air dance party with live bands playing the hard-grooving sounds of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, New York and beyond! Taking place alongside Downtown First Thursdays, Salsa Nights adds a whole new dimension to the neighborhood. Friends, families and conga lines welcome!

Yerba Buena Salsa Nights

Yerba Buena Gardens 

Every summer some of Brazil’s greatest musicians gather in the redwoods of Cazadero for California Brazil Camp, and every season several faculty members venture down to the Gardens to share their mesmerizing music. Past concerts have included some of the South American nation’s most celebrated artists, such as Monica Salmaso, Teco Cardoso, Guinga and Fabiana Cozza. This year’s show, “Brazilian Choro” is led by two masters at the forefront of a virtuosic instrumental tradition that marked Brazil’s first African/European musical fusion, clarinetist/composer Alexandre Ribeiro and seven-string guitarist/composer Alessandro Penezzi. Born in late 19th century Rio de Janeiro, choro has undergone repeated revivals over the decades, while influencing almost every subsequent Brazilian idiom, from samba to Brazilian jazz. Frequent performing and recording partners, Penezzi and Ribeiro played an essential role in sparking the choro renaissance of the 1990s. They’ve forged deep ties to many Bay Area musical Brazilophiles and will be joined by several colleagues for an afternoon of jaw-dropping instrumental interplay.

Brazil in the Gardens: Alexandre Ribeiro and Alessandro Penezzi

The son of Ecuadoran immigrants, Roberto Carlos Lange is a producer and singer-songwriter who has created an expansive, intoxicating body of music as Helado Negro. Known for crafting compassionate, atmospheric, and experimental pop music, he joins forces with Reyna Tropical, a decade-long project led by Fabi Reyna, the Mexican-born, Texas-raised activist, and guitarist who also founded She Shreds Magazine – the world’s first and only print publication dedicated to women guitarists and bassists. Reyna Tropical expands on their highly personal blend of Afro-Indigenous drum beats, Reyna’s gauzy guitar riffs and environmental samples.

Helado Negro + Reyna Tropical

The 7th Annual African Arts Festival celebrates the glorious diversity and extraordinary creativity of the continent’s peoples. Co-presented by Duniya Dance and Drum Company and the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, it’s a family-friendly celebration of live music and dance featuring Bay Area ensembles representing different regions of Africa and the African diaspora. Formed in April 2007, Duniya Dance and Drum Company creates dance and music from the Indian state of Punjab, the West African nation of Guinea and beyond, as well as unique blends of these forms. Along with interactive activities like dance and drum lessons and face-painting for children, vendors offer a variety of traditional African food and goods for sale, including clothing, jewelry, hair care and skin care. “The idea for the festival came from the desire to bring Africans and the diaspora together as one community in the Bay Area, to inspire each other and share each other’s culture,” explains Duniya Dance and Drum Company Artistic Director Bongo Sidibe. “We are highlighting joy and celebrating who we are as Black people.”

African Arts Festival

A wind quintet with an imperative mission, Quinteto Latino is a singular Bay Area-based chamber ensemble devoted to breaking down the racial and social barriers that have long plagued the classical music world. Spotlighting and performing compositions by artists of Latin American heritage, the quintet’s acclaimed musicians are devoted to building community through classical music, performance and advocacy. With concerts featuring expertly melded flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn and bassoon, QL brings out the vibrant colors and vigorous rhythms of Latin American music. The group’s programs include arrangements of beloved Latino folk melodies and contemporary works by illustrious composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank, Orlando Jacinto García and Paquito D’Rivera, including many commissioned by the ensemble.

Quinteto Latino

Since launching in 2023 Follow the Music has been at the forefront of a rising movement promoting arts education around the Bay Area. The nonprofit organization introduces its next phase with an emerging artists music festival designed to showcase aspiring young musicians. Bringing families and young people from all over the region to the urban oasis of the Gardens, Follow the Music celebrates the Bay Area’s unrivaled cultural heritage by building a bridge between that legacy and the young people carrying it forward. Featuring musicians ages 14-25, the event includes musicians from the San Francisco Community Music Center, Oakland School for the Arts, SFJAZZ, GLIDE Memorial Church, Blue Bear School of Music, Elevate Oakland, Enriching Lives Through Music and other organizations. Drawing on the Bay Area’s cultural diversity, the lineup crosses genres from classical and jazz to soul, rock and Latin jazz. It also features guest speakers from music, sports and popular culture. A community resource fair provides families and students with opportunities to connect directly with many Bay Area music education programs while learning about classes and scholarships. The muse can take many pathways and Follow the Music is here to ensure that all are open.

Follow the Music

A party, a workout, a meditation and a communal celebration, Yerba Buena Gardens Dance Day is a portal to a joyous dance-filled world! Presented by YBG Festival and Rhythm & Motion, YBG Dance Day transforms the Gardens into an outdoor dance heaven where participants can sample dance in a variety of forms and flavors with some of the Bay Area’s most talented teachers. Classes are one-hour long and span a wide range of dance genres. Whether you are new to dance or a seasoned professional, Yerba Buena Gardens Dance Day is open to everyone! Bring comfortable shoes, a water bottle and your curiosity for movement – stay for an hour or the full day. Invite friends and family. This is your day to dance!

This year, Dance Day honors the life and legacy of Rhythm & Motion founder Consuelo Faust (1953-2025). We celebrate the spirit she championed – living the belief that anyone can dance and that dance has the power to bring people together in joy. Following the day of classes, there will be a celebratory music and dance performance that uplifts her vision and the vibrant SF Bay Area dance community she deeply loved and helped to nurture throughout her life.

YBG Dance Day

Join us in celebration of San Francisco Indigenous Peoples Day with a magnificent profusion of Native American art, music and vendors. The event highlights the vastly diverse and talented community of Indigenous artists in the Bay Area, California and the Americas. Presented on Yelamu, Ramaytush Ohlone Territory, in partnership with the International Indian Treaty Council, the program at Yerba Buena Gardens follows the Annual Indigenous Peoples Day Sunrise Gathering on Alcatraz – please check the IITC website for updates. Schedule to be announced.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day with special performance by Jeremy Dutcher

The 100th anniversary of John Coltrane’s birthday has inspired dozens of performances across the Bay Area this year, but no artist is better equipped to evoke the legacy of the saxophone titan and spiritual seeker than Richard Howell. An acclaimed musician, composer and educator, he defines his performances as “Bridge Music,” a jazz pathway that creates sonic connection across obstacles and differences. It’s music that celebrates diversity as it bridges, unites and merges the experience of all listeners, an approach rooted in the spirit of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Howell, who spent years on the road with Etta James, also embraces the contradiction of James Brown’s simple yet intricate African-inspired rhythmic concepts and the deep soulfulness of the Isley Brothers. As a saxophonist and vocalist, he has a gift for connecting to multi-generational audiences with an abiding spirituality that invites all listeners to partake. He’s particularly eager to present an afternoon honoring the spirit and music of John Coltrane, he explains. “I’ve had the blessing of a close relationship with his son, Ravi Coltrane, as my son Elé has been part of Ravi’s rhythm section as a drummer for the past seven years. What I’m envisioning is an acoustic jazz quartet – tenor saxophone, acoustic piano, bass and drums – rooted in the Coltrane tradition, but also reflecting the living continuum of that music.”

Richard Howell’s John Coltrane Tribute

Festival favorite Joe Bataan, a Latin music legend since the mid-1960s, returns to the Gardens for his third performance in the past four years. He made an indelible mark as one of the early stars of Fania Records with a seductive combination of doo-wop vocals and boogaloo, one of the era’s defining sounds. Born Bataan Nitollano to a Filipino father and African-American mother and raised in Spanish Harlem, he is the father of the Latin soul sound, crooning hits like “Gypsy Woman” and “Ordinary Guy.” But Bataan never stayed in one groove for long. He went on to expand his sound in the ’70s with his Ghetto Records releases, co-coining the apt moniker “salsoul,” though he adapted to changing currents at the end of the decade with forays into disco and hip-hop (scoring the early rap hit “Rap-O Clap-O” in 1979). Stepping back from performing in the early ‘80s, he largely disappeared from the scene while working as a youth counselor in detention facilities. It’s a dramatic story that he recounts with humor and searing detail in his 2024 memoir Streetology: The Legacy of the Afro-Filipino, King of Latin Soul. Since returning to music in 2005, he’s reclaimed his crown and is still going strong in his 80s, a fact made evident by his triumphant YBG Festival performances.

Joe Bataan

Few artists have appeared at the Festival more frequently than flutist, percussionist and arranger John Calloway. Whether he’s leading his own band, performing in the sextet of longtime creative partner John Santos, or directing the Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco, Calloway is a Bay Area icon who’s been at the center of the San Francisco Latin jazz scene for some five decades. But his latest and most personal project yet, the Afro-Filipino Jazz Project, takes his music in a new direction. Founded in 2022 as a creative, interactive space, the Project is intended to bring together Afro Filipinx, African American and Filipino American musicians to explore a broad range of musical styles, with a particular emphasis on jazz idioms, African American roots and traditional and folkloric Filipino music. It’s one component of the larger Afro-Filipino Project, a platform dedicated to highlighting and celebrating, individually and collectively, the art practices and artists of the African American and Filipino American communities whose contributions have profoundly shaped our nation’s artistic narrative. For this performance the AFJP features bass star Marcus Shelby, inveterately grooving drummer Deszon Claiborne, Latin jazz piano specialist Murray Low, saxophonist TJ Milan, Conrad Benedicto on kulintang, vocalist and dancer Ting Alvarez and guest vocalist Anna Maria Flechero.