There are numerous indications that we, in San Francisco, are back.
For starters, our baseball team is the absolute worst this season—complete “cheeks,” as the kids would say. Buster Posey, who serves as the president of baseball operations for the San Francisco Giants, hired former Tennessee Volunteers head coach Tony Vitello as the team’s manager. This historic decision bypassed traditional professional coaching ranks to bring a heavily decorated college coach directly to the majors.
It’s not working.
My stepfather, a Yankees fan forever, told me in April, “There is no way that dugout was going to listen to a college coach.”
Who is the one person that the struggling dugout would listen to?
A three-World-Series-ring-having, MVP-award-possessing, elite “I only talk when I have something to say” San Francisco hero, Buster Posey. And until that switch is made, get used to watching the Dodgers and Padres battle it out, folks, while the former Oakland A’s somehow chip away at decency in a 15,000-seat capacity AAA ballpark in the dead heat of Sacramento.
So wait, why are we back? Our community has been somewhat shielded from this horrific baseball season, thanks to the glorious and wonderful Golden State Valkyries. That joy button of a franchise is making the Bay Area sports index a compendium of positivity and light.
The Valkyries made WNBA history in their inaugural season by becoming the first expansion team to reach the playoffs. They posted a 23-21 record, shattering the league’s previous record for wins by an expansion team, and finished the season by selling out all of their home games. They increased that winning bandwidth through a major 2026 draft-day move, acquiring Spanish forward and former UC Berkeley standout Marta Suárez.
Two years ago, the Golden State Valkyries paid $50 million to enter the WNBA. Today, they’re the most valuable franchise in league history, worth $1 billion. The team’s true worth can be seen in the eyes of BART riders after every game; no matter if it was a win or loss, it’s always a joyful trip afterwards, a collective vibe on public transit. “Protect Ballhalla at All Costs!”
Zendaya. Zendaya. Zendaya. This Oakland native seems resolute in silently apologizing to us for a lackluster third season of “Euphoria” by continually popping in at local retail and culinary shops. One journey included an afternoon in the Inner Richmond accompanied by co-star Hunter Schafer in which the pair visited several Clement Street shops, including Green Apple Books, Pasta Supply Co., Foggy Notion, and Aroma Tea Shop. Their tour reminded me of the late, great Robin Williams’ love for his mom-and-pop businesses in his Richmond neighborhood. If you’ve ever done retail work, Jack, you know that dealing with the public en masse, ain’t always easy.
But guess what, Bay Area? We are back! Hello again, lovers of music and culture. We are Under the Stars, a quasi-weekly column that stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases, upcoming shows, and other adjacent items. We keep it moving, hustling with the changes, thinking outside the margins. We’ve been doing this for five years… Spend some time with us…
JARED MATTSON AND RUBAN NIELSON AT CAFE DU NORD, JULY 8
Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 and Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra have released an instrumental album with peaks and valley chord structures and guitar riffs, modal ideas just leaping from one song to another. As the story goes, FEAR was recorded in June 2024, the year Mattson and Nielson first met in person after having previously crossed paths online as longtime admirers of each other’s music.
“We imagined the music living in in-between places—old motels with buzzing vacancy signs, abandoned gas stations at dusk, and vast parking lots lit by sodium lamps where engines idle and lives briefly overlap,” goes the album’s press statement. “Spaces built for movement, not comfort. Bleak, anonymous, quietly human. Music that could sit inside that loneliness without trying to fix it—beauty carrying a low hum of danger underneath, calm without anaesthesia.”
This is a project you want to hear at such a venue as du Nord, almost as if it were built for that type of intimacy. It’s a date you can’t pass up.
Grab tickets here.
SATYA, YELLOW HOUSE (GIANT MUSIC)
When something hits this deeply and honestly, you don’t care how it’s labeled by genre linguistics; it’s just that good. Oakland native Satya released her debut record Yellow House a couple of weeks ago, and the first cut off the album “Project 10” meanders through ambient alt-rock avenues and twangy soul charts to give this engaging song dealing with depression a mysterious, unresolved feel that personifies Satya’s Kodachrome amalgamate of soul, jazz, folk, and Americana.
Grab Yellow House here.
HADLEY CALIMAN, IAPETUS (WEWANTSOUNDS)
When Bay Area jazz and psychedelic rock luminaries like Mongo Santamaria, Santana, and the Grateful Dead were looking for an edge player capable of handling duties on both tenor saxophone and flute, Hadley Caliman was their first choice, having made a significant impact on the city’s underground music scene. His full sonic delivery and musical dexterity brought his name into rooms well before he actually got to the set.
And now, Wewantsounds is offering the first vinyl re-issue of Hadley Caliman’s 1972 amalgam album Iapetus is part funk jazz and other times deep spiritual modal transmission. Recorded in LA with a who’s who of West Coast players including Todd Cochran, Woody “Sonship” Theus, Luis Gasca, and Victor Pantoja, it was mostly drafted by Todd Cochran (aka Bayeté) soon after he composed Bobby Hutcherson’s Blue Note masterwork Head On.
With a Fender Rhodes preference and punctuated by Cochran’s exquisite keyboard style, Iapetus is adored by deep crate diggers, ever looking for that special chunk of goodness. Yes, it’s been sampled by De La Soul and KDot. It’s also a journeying album to whisk away the afternoon.
Cochran explains: “We were a circle of friends, and the music was our shared language—a way to translate the high-velocity energy of San Francisco into something timeless.”
Caliman would continue to collaborate with Julian Priester on his landmark Love, Love album, recorded here in SF at Different Fur Recording Studio, on ECM, as well as through their work with Mtume, Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, and Aretha Franklin.
This stands out as a peak moment from a sometimes forgotten-about career.
Get it here.
JENNY GILLESPIE MASON, IN THE SAFETY OF THE LIGHT (NATIVE CAT)
This Berkeley-based artist has more than a decade of experience delving into psychedelic pop, jazz, and electronic textures through her project Sis. Native Cat Recordings, the label Jenny Gillespie Mason founded, has become a vessel for personal flow, a way of synthesizing her various identities as an artist, wife, and mother. She also put out the local group Brijeans’ first record Walkie Talkie.
Previously, Sis was front-loaded with ambient modal tones: abstract jazz fusion rooted in groove, using vintage keyboards such as the Clavinet, Philicordia, Fender Rhodes, B3 Hammond organ, Farfisa, and ARP Odyssey. But Gillespie Mason is deploying her alias In the Safety of the Light for this work, which was produced by Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart) and recorded in the spring of 2026 at a private studio in Los Angeles. It looks toward the acoustic guitar work of her youth, working through the idea of how to live a spiritual life while remaining fully human, while pulling inspiration from the pastoral glow of 1970s British folk. With it, Jenny Gillespie Mason has finally arrived.
Grab the debut here.
JAMES BLOOD ULMER
Free Lancing was the album you could find at one time in ALL the thrift stores in San Francisco for anywhere from 75 cents to a buck fifty. But that price had nothing to do with what it was worth, not by a long shot. The release’s cover image is that of a sweaty guitarist with his eyes closed, yet still radiating an inner grin and an imagination somewhere lost and found amongst the void above. Yes indeedy, James Blood Ulmer did have a jabbering electric guitar. As NPR noted in his obituary, he passed on June 3 at the Upper East Side Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in New York City. He was 86.
His playing style—haunted free jazz, psychedelic funk, and avant-garde blues—rushed out to listeners’ ears in vivid waves of prismatic colors. I swear I saw one of his performances on one of those late-night shows in the ’80s in which he appeared as the embodiment of that Paul Schaeffer, downtown New York-type. Playing with the likes of tenor saxophonist David Murray and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, Ulmer moved around contrasting sounds and textures as if such mastery were the norm.
As noted in an obituary released by Blood’s family, the late music critic Greg Tate once described James as “the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and [his favorite guitarist] Wes Montgomery on one hand and P-Funk and Mississippi Fred McDowell on the other.”
Also: “Beyond his lifelong dedication to music, Blood was a father to six children: Greg, Donna, Michael, Gia, Damu, and Nisa. He was also the proud grandfather of 12 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. To the world, James Blood Ulmer was a legend, a visionary, and a musical force whose sound was distinctive. To his family, he was their teacher, their storyteller, and a source of strength. To Eva, his wife and partner, James was her rock, her hero, and her beloved companion of sixteen years. His music was fearless, and so was his spirit.”
