Yoshi's (jazz club)

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Yoshi's is the preeminent jazz club of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Yoshi's on Fillmore Street, San Francisco

Nels Cline performing in 2006 at Yoshi's, Oakland

Started as a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley by Yoshi Akiba, a World War II war orphan, (who came to the United States to study dance, art, and dance therapy), and her friends Kaz Kajimura and Hiroyuki Hori, the club soon moved to a larger space on Claremont Avenue in Oakland, California and began to feature live jazz music. It eventually gained a reputation as one of the most significant jazz venues on the West Coast.

In May of 1997 the club moved to Jack London Square during the revitalization of the Port of Oakland, as a 330-seat, 17,000 square foot jazz concert hall with an attached 220 seat Japanese restaurant, assisted by funding from the Oakland Development Agency. ^[1] On November 28, 2007, it opened a second 28,000 square foot location in San Francisco's Fillmore District, as a flagship of the city's attempt to restore the formerly African-American neighborhood (which was uprooted in the 1970s by urban renewal) as a center of black culture and jazz. ^[2] ^[3] Roy Haynes was the featured performer on the opening night of the new San Francisco location. ^[4]